Building apps with Tines pages
With Tines pages, you can build interactive apps for your end users.
What is a page?
In this lesson, we will explore Tines pages, a powerful feature that allows you to create interactive web-based interfaces to collect input, customize branding, control distribution, and design various page elements. Tines pages are an essential component of the Tines automation platform, enabling you to streamline and enhance your automation workflows. Let's dive into the key aspects of Tines pages as outlined in the link provided below.
Collecting input with pages introduces you to the concept of forms within Tines pages. Forms provide a structured way to gather information from users or external stakeholders. You'll learn how to create different types of form fields, such as text inputs, checkboxes, dropdown menus, and more. Additionally, you'll understand how to validate user input, handle submissions, and pass collected data to your automation workflows.
Branding and style focuses on customizing the appearance and branding of your Tines pages. You'll learn to apply custom styles, colors, and logos to align the pages with your organization's brand identity. This feature allows you to create a consistent user experience and maintain a professional look and feel throughout your stakeholder interactions.
Distribution and access control delves into the distribution and access control options for Tines pages. You'll discover how to control who can access your pages, whether it's limiting access to specific users or allowing public access. Furthermore, you'll learn how to share your pages, including generating shareable links or embedding them directly into other websites or applications.
List of page elements provides a comprehensive list of available page elements in Tines pages. These elements include headers, paragraphs, images, buttons, tables, code blocks, and more. You'll understand how to use these elements to structure your pages effectively, present information, and create intuitive user interfaces.
By exploring these aspects of Tines pages, you'll be able to leverage the full potential of this feature to create interactive interfaces, collect input, customize branding, control access, and design engaging page layouts. This, in turn, will enable you to enhance your automation workflows, streamline data collection, and improve collaboration with both internal and external stakeholders.
Remember to refer to the provided links above for more detailed information and examples related to each aspect of pages. Experimenting with Tines pages and applying the concepts learned in this lesson will empower you to optimize your automation processes and drive efficiency within your organization.
Creating intake forms
The easiest way to start using pages is by creating an intake form. Forms allow you to:
Collect data from users through input fields.
Use that data in your Tines stories.
Trigger actions based on the form submissions.
For example, you can:
Survey users.
Collect system requests.
Upload files for analysis.
Connecting pages to stories
The data from your forms can feed into your Tines stories and trigger actions:
A team member can submit a URL to check if it's malicious.
Tines can then check the URL with multiple services.
Send an email to the user with the results.
You can also:
Generate a dynamic link to a page from within a story.
Send that link to the user via email.
This allows part of your app to trigger a page for additional input.
Example: IP evaluation app
We can quickly see how to build an app leveraging pages to build the interface. Whenever building apps, it helps to write out the key activities you want. This helps frame which parts may need a page.
Example:
Capturing a user’s request to have an IP reviewed [page].
Submit IPs to be evaluated by a tool [HTTP request action].
Building reports from two systems [event transform action].
If there is nothing in one of the systems, note it [trigger action] + [note].
Log the request in Jira [HTTP request action].
Show the final results of the story [page].
In this example, we can see how we leverage a page to create an initial intake process of data to be evaluated. Then after it gets through the HTTP requests to the services, we use an event transform to build out a basic report, including the IP we reviewed and any analytics around it. We can add triggers to give us some error handling and then move the final result to a Jira ticket. If we wanted to, we could even display those final results on a page, evaluating a piece of data and giving our end user an interactive experience for having a piece of data evaluated.
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Extra tips:
What else can we do with our app?
Referencing your app as it flows through your story. We don’t need to start with a page link to kick it off. We can have a story run, and in the middle, we can generate a dynamic link to the page we want to share with our users. This is especially useful when we want to send a page to get additional information or to send information on a page.
The easiest way to do this is by sending an email with a dynamic link to a portion of your app.
In summary, Tines pages and stories work together to build powerful apps. Start with simple intake forms to collect the input your stories need, then connect them to trigger actions and workflows.