Business packs

A Feature Pack is a finished feature you can add to your project instead of building it: its pages, its server code, its tables, its tests and a short tour for the people who will use it. Business packs are the packs Sapilon builds and maintains for the things business apps ask for most. They’re marked By Sapilon.

Finding one

Open Services, then the Feature Packs tab, and choose Business. Packs are grouped by area: Foundation, Sales, Finance, Operations, Service and People. Each card says what the pack adds and which other packs it works with.

Packs are added in the Build stage. In the Design stage the page tells you so.

What applying does

Choose a pack, then Apply to this project. Before anything changes, Sapilon shows what the apply will do, and you choose:

• Also adds: packs this one needs. An invoice needs someone to invoice, so Invoices brings Contacts if your project doesn’t have it yet. They’re added first, in the same step.
• Services: a service the pack needs is ticked and marked (needed). One it can use but doesn’t need says Works better with: leave it off and the pack works without that part.
• Who can use it: the roles the pack suggests (an Accountant, a Dispatcher). Create them, or give their permissions to roles you already have. Untick anything you’d rather set up yourself on the Roles page.
• Works with what you have: bridges (see below).
• Add demo data so the pages aren’t empty: a few sample records, so you can try the pages straight away. Leave it unticked for a project that already has real data.

The apply is one change to your project. If something goes wrong partway, nothing is half added: you can discard the change and try again. A service you turned on in the dialog stays on, since it is a separate change.

When the pages are in, the agent wires them into your app: it adds them to the menu and joins them to what’s already there. Then Sapilon builds the app to check that everything fits.

Bridges

Some packs are useful on their own and better together. Quotes and Invoices each work alone, but a quote someone accepts should be able to become an invoice. The small piece of code that joins two packs is a bridge.

You never apply a bridge directly. When you apply a pack and your project already has one it works with, the dialog offers the bridge under Works with what you have, ticked. If you add the second pack later, its apply offers the bridge then.

Changing a pack after it’s added

Once applied, the pack’s code is your project’s code. Ask the agent to change it like anything else: “add a purchase order number to invoices”, “make the booking form ask for a phone number”. The agent knows which packs you’ve applied and what each one expects to stay true (totals that are computed, never stored; a booking that can’t overlap another), so it changes them without breaking them.

If you ask for something a business pack already does, the agent may suggest the pack instead of building it from scratch. You can apply it from the card or tell the agent to go ahead and build it.

Public pages

A few packs give your customers a page they can open without signing in: a quote they can accept, an invoice they can view, a time slot they can book. Each one shows only what its link is for, never a list of your records.