Simplifying CRUD operations using budibase

Budibase is an open-source, low-code platform. It is used to help developers and IT professionals build, automate and ship internal tools on their infrastructure within minutes. This app integrates everything that is needed to build internal tools such as; dashboards, admin panels, approved apps, and everything in between. Using Budibase, you can quickly transform data and processes into internal tools.

Prerequisite

To get started, you must have Docker and Docker Compose installed on your machine.

If the above pop-up is displayed while installing Docker, then click on the link in the pop-up to install WSL 2. After this, restart the device.

Using Digital Ocean is another way to get started with Budibase.

Once the Docker installation is completed successfully, give the following commands in your terminal.

• Install the Budibase CLI.

$ npm i -g @budibase/cli

• Setup Budibase (select where to store Budibase, and the port to run it on)

budi hosting --init

• Run Budibase(This step takes time to complete for the first time)

budi hosting --start

• Create your admin user:

Enter the email and password for the new admin user.

Log in to the application after starting Budibase.

Post-logging-in to the application

1. Create a new application by clicking on “Create new app”.
2. User will be redirected to the Data module (which appears in the top left corner).

Data Module

In this module, you can create internal tables using the Budibase database or connect to an external database.

Creating Internal Tables Using Budibase Database

• Click on Budibase DB to create tables of your choice.

• After creating tables, you can now add columns and rows of your choice.

Connecting to an External Database

• Click on the + icon in the Sources tab to connect to external data sources. You can choose from different types of DataSources such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc. After this, you must provide the configuration details like port number, host number etc. of the chosen database.
• In case you want to connect to any cloud-based database service like RDS, or DynamoDB, import data from the cloud service to any database design tool. After this, you must provide the configuration details of the chosen database.
• Mention the hostname, port number, user role, and password to connect to your external DB.

Note:

1. Always import the data from the cloud-based service to the database design tool to avoid port-number conflicts in the Budibase configuration.
2. The design tool will differ according to the database language which we use in our project.

• Click on Fetch Tables from DB. You can fetch your tables once the Database is connected. In case the tables are not listed, refresh the screen once. After that, click on your database to view the list of tables. Clicking on the tables in the list will display its records.

• You can also write queries to the database.
• While writing queries, you can choose the type of function to be performed such as read, update, delete, and create.

Design Module

To perform CRUD (Create Read Update Delete) operations, you need to create a template first.

• You can choose a template by clicking on the + icon at the top left corner.
• On clicking the + icon, you can either build templates from scratch or use the existing templates (for CRUD operations) from the design module. The create-from-scratch option helps the user add data as per his/her requirements to create/design the app.

• If you want the screen to be accessible from the navigation bar you can give a name and enable create a link in the navigation bar or else disable it.

List of Built-in Templates

There are built-in templates for each table in the Database. You can use them to create new records, and edit, delete and view records in the table.

• Table name-New -> Used for creating a new record
• Table name-List ->Used to list the records
• Table name-Detail ->Used to edit or delete a particular record

After creating New Screen and choosing the template, you can design according to your choice using the settings panel which appears on the right side.

After designing your screen, click on the Play button. Your CRUD operations are now ready to be executed.

Conclusion

Budibase application can help perform CRUD operations with ease as minimal coding knowledge is sufficient for the same.