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Our 2021 Chicago release is here! Thanks to customer feedback, analyst insights, and months of hard work from our product team, we’ve got some exciting upgrades you’re going to love.
In September 2020, I shared my experience with the Skuid Boston release. I’m back again to give you the scoop on Chicago, straight from the app builder’s mouth.
With enhancements like a V1 to V2 migration feature, a new calendar component, and more, builders can seamlessly build better apps faster, and improve user experience.
One of my favorite things about this Chicago release is how V2 offers ways to reduce any V1 technical debt by combining UI requirements and Action Framework features declaratively. Be sure to take advantage of that!
Let’s dive into what else you can do with Skuid Chicago.
Migrate pages from V1 to V2 in a matter of minutes.
If you want to access everything Chicago has to offer, you’ll need to make the leap to V2. I’m helping my customers do this now, and they’re glad they did. For those who’ve wanted to migrate but were afraid of the process: we’ve heard you!
The old way of migrating pages from V1 to V2 was cumbersome and required manual XML page edits, which I often found to be error-prone. If you have many Skuid V1 pages, that turns into a massive effort.
So, with Skuid Chicago, we’re offering a cool migration feature. While this tool isn’t turnkey for all your pages, it will make the migration process smoother and faster.
Using the migration wizard—which guides you through the process—choose the pages you want to migrate. I recommend you start by converting your master, home, dashboard pages. This will give you a solid foundation for how much better your app will look in V2!
The tool also clones V1 pages so they aren’t lost, and the whole conversion process takes only a few seconds per page.
Once migrated, the Composer will show a list of issues and considerations you need to resolve to finish each page. Just follow the list to complete the migration.
Build calendar views easier than ever.
Skuid Chicago has a tighter integration between the calendar and the Action Framework and Design System Studio. What that means for you: code-free customization to create even better calendar experiences that you'd expect in consumer-grade applications.
For instance, connect tasks, opportunities, or any custom objects and create custom action sequences to call straight from your event detail. This is especially useful if you have existing action sequences that you’re using in other ways—connect them to the calendar and start your action from there.
Standard calendar actions include all the best practices for communicating with your user while things are working behind the scenes. We’ve always suggested that when runtime actions take a few moments, you surface a message to let the user know what’s happening. The calendar in Chicago comes with that pattern built in, which is a great way to see what action and copy we recommend for future builds.
The new calendar component is all about helping your users see and do more in a calendar view. Display Salesforce events, tasks, or custom object records. Connect to any data in your org with a date and present information in the most digestible ways. You can also display data from other sources like a REST API or Google Calendar. Plus, set controls for users to add, edit, or delete calendar events.
I’m particularly excited about the new all-day/multi-day events capability: display week-long conferences and all-day kickoffs, or even just reminders and deadlines, alongside meetings and calls.
The new calendar also includes new styling options in Design System Studio. Create seamless branded calendar experiences in your customer or partner community as well as internal apps like group calendars for sales and project teams.
Add your own custom fonts in Design System Studio.
To stand out in a crowded marketplace, brand identity matters. But how can you make apps look uniquely “you” when all you can apply are out-of-the-box fonts?
With Skuid Chicago, now you can have your fonts and use them, too. Design System Studio supports referencing a custom font by URL, it’s as easy as that. Display the fonts that represent you best, all declaratively.
Other goodies I like to reduce technical debt
Add columns to a form, so you can still follow design specs without splitting a form into multiple components. This also helps with migration if you’re using columns and column sets in V1 field editors. And for new users, the Form component is an easy way to smoothly lay out your info.
Chicago offers Salesforce Lightning Workspace API support. Instead of building an entire Lightning Web Component, with V2, easily access Lightning features with minimal JavaScript. I found this low-code solution a big help rather than having to do it from scratch.
And now I can configure exports directly from the table component. Chicago allows me to configure columns, append rows, load more records before export, and even give the export a custom file name.
As I move towards more declarative Action Sequences over custom code in my V2 pages, I’m using the Action Disabling feature more. This makes it easier to debug my Skuid pages in a non-code environment. Optimize actions in a more performant manner with this quality of life feature!
Learn more about the Chicago release here.
Dubai Release: Check out the latest Skuid release, Dubai.
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