QuickBase Straight Up

Smartphones and tablet devices change our lives at home, work, and on the go. Now, QuickBase is part of the mobile revolution.

At least 3 mobile apps work directly with QuickBase, and a fourth app provides a nice platform-independent bridge to QuickBase data. In this article, I’ll take a quick look at these choices, and let you know what might be best for you.

(Full disclosure: One of the apps comes out of my shop. But I’ll do my best to be impartial. That’s easy, in fact, because all three apps use the same tool set and produce similar results.)

The three apps now available are:

• PocketBase from Madskills, Inc. Written for iPhone and iPad, PocketBase was the first app out of the gate, published on the iTunes App Store on July 4, 2010. It costs $1.99.
• QuickDroid, from Bret Foreman. This $10 app for Android devices was launched in October, 2010. (Don’t confuse this app with the identically named QuickDroid app from Daniel Himmelein, which has nothing to do with QuickBase.)
• MobileBase, from The Data Collaborative. This free Android app from my shop is the newest offering on the market. It was published this month

Comparing Basic Features of the Apps

Getting Started. Generally, to use any of the apps, you enter a username and password, select an application, a table, and a report, and then you can view the report. If you are an Enterprise QuickBase user, all three apps let you select a realm.

App Tokens. All three apps permit you to enter app tokens. But typing those 26 alphanumeric characters on a teeny keyboard can be very frustrating. The easiest solution is to allow access to your applications without apptokens.

MobileBase provides one other option by providing a default app token that makes life a bit easier, because you can type the app token into your computer instead of your phone. But taking that route compromises security, since the app token is not private.

Sending Email and Making Phone Calls from QuickBase. All three apps also allow you to click on email addresses to send email. And PocketBase and MobileBase do the same with phone numbers. QuickBase durations are a little tricky (do you display them in seconds, hours, years, or what?) but MobileBase and QuickDroid both handle these well.

What You See On Your Screen. All three apps struggle with presentation, which makes sense as you just cannot display as much data on a smartphone display as you can on a computer screen. PocketBase handles this challenge by giving you neat search capability to search for a row within a report. MobileBase gives you two presentation modes. One mode shows as a table (displaying lots of data but can require horizontal scrolling). The other mode shows as an expandable list (displays less data until you click on a row). All three apps allow you to view reports in table mode.

PocketBase and MobileBase both allow you to save favorites, which makes it easier to return to reports you want to see again and again.

Why are these three apps all so similar? It’s because they all use the same toolset. QuickBase gives us a limited number of tools (or “API calls”) that we can use to connect with QuickBase. Those tools allow apps to do some things easily and other things not so easily. We’d like to allow you to generate new reports from your phone, but the available API calls do not make that easy. We’d also like to let you look at charts, but those are not available through the API. (MobileBase gets around this by opening the charts and summary reports in your Android’s browser, so you can at least view them that way).

So can I enter data into QuickBase on any of these? Sadly, the answer is no. But don’t despair and please read on, because a fourth app offers another option. Data entry in any of these apps would be a little more complex than data reporting. Although all three developers are considering adding data entry to a future version, none have done so yet. Here at Data Collaborative, we are waiting to see what the demand is like for QuickBase smartphone apps, and I suspect the other developers are doing the same.

So what’s the solution if I want to enter data to QuickBase from my smartphone? Canvas provides a neat tool for cross-platform data entry, such as from your smartphone to QuickBase. You design a form once, and then you can use it on many smartphones. For now, Canvas handles Android, Windows, and Blackberry models; iPhones and iPads are coming soon. At Data Collaborative, we’ve connected Canvas with QuickBase (and QuickBooks too, if you’re interested). There is an additional charge for Canvas.

So vote with your fingers! Check out these apps and then rate them in the appropriate marketplace. I bet I can speak for all the developers in saying that we look forward to hearing what you have to say!
That’s it for now. Happy clicking –

Eric Segal
The Data Collaborative
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Have you ever wished that life had an undo button? Accidents happen, and in some cases they just can’t be undone. But there’s no reason for accidentally deleted QuickBase records to be among life’s irreversible errors.

“Soft deletion” refers to the practice of marking records for deletion without actually removing the data. It’s easy to implement in QuickBase and it’s a great way to ensure that you’ll never again find yourself slapping your forehead wishing you hadn’t just clicked delete.

To implement soft deletion in your application, begin by creating a checkbox field called “Delete.” For most of your users, this will become the new “Delete” button in lieu of QuickBase’s built-in delete feature.

Next, go to Customize > Roles. The trick here is to configure the roles of ordinary users so that they can only view and modify records whose “Delete” field is unchecked. (We recommend leaving the Administrator role with full access to all records, so that it is possible to access and un-delete the soft-deleted records.) For ordinary users, the permissions settings should look something like these:

Notice that the user does not have the ability to delete records using the built-in delete function. Instead, the user’s viewing and modifying abilities are limited to a certain set of records, determined by the following rule:

To the ordinary or average user, the Modify Record page now features a “Delete” button that is actually a “soft delete” checkbox rather than the standard Delete button.

One downside to soft deletion is that it can lead to clutter; it’s unseen clutter for ordinary users, but for you it’s clutter nonetheless. One way to tackle this issue is to create custom reports for roles that have the ability to view soft-deleted records (typically just the Administrator role). Excluding soft-deleted records from the “List All” report and creating a separate report exclusively for them is a good strategy to separate out the clutter and manage the soft-deleted records.

A More Advanced Solution…
An alternative method is to add the “Delete” field from a master/child relationship as a lookup in the child table. Then secure the child table based on the new lookup field.

This approach allows you to soft-delete the master record and cause all child records to be soft-deleted as well.

We would be happy to work with you to implement this solution in your database.

That’s it for now. Happy clicking –

Eric Segal
The Data Collaborative

Recently in QuickBase Straight Up, we provided you with some tips for enhancing QuickBase dashboards and pages with jQuery. Here, we offer another way to get the most from your dashboard, by embedding auto-refreshing charts in iframes. It’s not a beginner-level project — you’ll have to get your hands dirty with a little bit of HTML — but we think you’ll be very pleased with the results.

Of course, QuickBase lets you embed charts in dashboards by default, but these images are static and don’t give you the kind of real-time access to your data that you may require. By embedding a frame with a refresh interval of 30 seconds or a minute, you can get an effortless real-time view of the latest changes to your QuickBase data.

For instance, let’s say your widget business manages its sales orders through QuickBase. A large volume of orders come in every day, and you want an easy way to keep tabs on which products are in the highest demand for the current day. The first step is to create a chart report that presents the information in the format you want it. In this case, we’ll use a pie chart to show the daily distribution of widget sales.

Once you have created your chart, the next step is to obtain the URL of the chart image (which is distinct from the URL of the QuickBase page on which the image resides). How to do this varies from browser to browser, but the first step is to right-click on the image. If an option called “Copy Image Address” or “Copy Image URL” is available, select that. Otherwise, select “Open Image in New Window” and copy the URL from that new window. In Internet Explorer, you may need to select “Properties” and copy the URL from the Properties window. The URL should look something like this:

https://www.quickbase.com/Chart/chart.aspx?realmhost=www.quickbase.com&dbid=bfjqnbu8m&qid=5
&generate=image

There are a couple changes to make here. First, after the parameter called "generate", change "image" to "map". Next, we’ll want to add some size parameters to the end of the URL so that the image can fit nicely on the dashboard. This can be done by inserting "&width=600&height=400" at the end of the URL. Note that 600 by 400 is just our recommended size; feel free to experiment with those values until you find the ideal resolution for your needs.

Now it’s time to add the chart to your QuickBase dashboard. Navigate to your application’s dashboard and click the “Customize this Page” link in the upper-right-hand corner of the page. On the customization page, click the “Add New Section” button and select the “Text” option. Click the “HTML” button in the new section’s toolbar to switch to HTML editing mode.

Now, insert the following code into the section:

<html>

<head>
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="30" />
</head>

<body>
<table>
<tr>
<td>
<iframe id="chart1" src="chart URL here" width="600" height="400" scrolling="no" marginwidth="0"
marginheight="0" frameborder="0">
</iframe>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</body>

</html>

In the <head> section of the code, the number 30 represents the refresh interval of the page in seconds. You can change this value to whatever you choose. In the <body> section, replace “chart URL here” with the image URL from earlier, making sure to preserve the quotation marks in the original HTML. Also, change the iframe’s width and height parameters to match those specified in the image URL. If you’d like to add multiple charts to your dashboard, simply duplicate the portion of code from <tr> to </tr> and fill in the other image URLs.

Congratulations! You now have an auto-refreshing dashboard - or maybe more than one.

Have you come up with any inventive uses for your auto-refreshing dashboard? Let us know!

Happy clicking –
Eric Segal
The Data Collaborative