PerfectApps ® Help Guide

1.Navigate to the Connections Dashboard. In the tree, select a connection that you have previously defined.

2.In the Actions table click on the + button underneath to create a new Action.

3.Click the Edit button for the new action.. (The screenshot shown below is an example for a Database Action, different connection types will show a slightly different screen.)

4.Name the connection using the Name field.

5.Select the action Type. The options listed depend on the connection type. The most common action for a database is a lookup, in which case you would choose SELECT.

6.If you are using a database connection, specify the name of the database table this connection should access.

7.Specify which app fields can be sent to the connection.

8.In the Send Parameters section, click Add to add a Send Parameter. Click in the Name column and give the parameter any name you like. The right-most column is the field or database column name. The middle column is the operator. You will usually leave it as = but you can change this if appropriate. Enter Like as an operator to allow wildcard searches in the connection actions. Note: Use the Auto Complete button to create parameters for every field in the database.

Take care when using the Auto Complete button with an existing Action. Whilst it will create new parameters for any new fields in the database it will also overwrite existing parameters and that could affect existing Connect or Connect & Search commands in apps.

In the case of a lookup, there may not be any data passed, in which case the list would remain empty. However, for example, if a user entered an order number into the app, you could pass this through to the query. Background lookups will mostly use a Send parameter. Popup Lookups will usually not need one. If you have some cases that will and others that won't, then you can define an action that expects them but you will simply ignore them in the Connect command.

9.In the Return Parameters list, click Add to add a row for each field of data expected to be returned. The first column is a name you can choose. The second column is the actual field name in the target database. Specify which values are expected to come back from the connection.  Note: Use the Auto Complete button to create parameters for every field in the database.

10.Where there is likely to be duplicated data returned from a table select the Distinct Values Only checkbox to return only one record.

Depending on the connection type, there may or may not be any expected return data. If it was an Insert connection, you would not expect any data returned. If it is a lookup then you would.

11.Click Apply Changes to save the action.