Tips for sharing apps in Exchange

When you choose to share an app in Quickbase Exchange, it will be copied, and the data and users will be removed from the copy. This topic gives you some tips on preparing that app before sharing it to Quickbase Exchange. Much of this work is done in the App Settings and Table Settings pages.

Note: If the app you're sharing is in an account on the Quickbase Essential plan, some items mentioned below, (such as cross-app relationships, multiple pages, customizable roles, and multiple forms) are not available.

Remove organization-specific names and references

Even though your app's data is removed at the start of the sharing process, your app may still have items named after employees, groups, events, or projects that are specific to your organization. You'll probably want to rename those items so that the names make sense to a Quickbase Exchange visitor. These items may include:

Field and table names
Role names
Report names
Notification, subscription, or reminder names

Branding elements

If your app has been branded for your organization, remove those branding elements.

Cross-app relationships

When the app was copied for sharing, Quickbase removed all cross-app relationships. Clean up any cross-app relationship details that may remain in the app. Check the fields, tables, forms, and reports that might be affected when those relationships were removed.

Test role-specific behavior

Does your app have a lot of role-specific behavior: parts of the interface hidden for some roles, restricted access to tables and reports, role-specific forms? If so, test all the roles in the app to make sure users in a given role are seeing what you expect them to see.

Spruce up home pages

Now that you can build app Home pages with drag-and-drop widgets, consider rebuilding your existing Home page to take advantage of these features.

Check the reports on each table Home page to make sure they're showing the information that would be most useful to someone visiting that table. Consider adding custom dynamic filters to your table Home pages.

Make it easy to understand

Add or edit the following items so that they provide good information for someone who is new to the app:

An app description
A table description for each table
A visually-distinctive icon for each table
A description for each report

This description does not display by default; select Show description on report page in the Report Builder to display it.
Field-level help tips, as needed
Descriptive text sections on forms

Consider creating a help page to introduce your app and making it available on the Help panel.

Remove app-specific names and references

When you choose an app to share, your original app is not changed in any way. Instead, it is copied, which means that the app DBID and table DBIDs in the app will change. Quickbase handles most of these changes behind the scenes, but if you have URL references to those DBIDs embedded in your app, those links will need to be changed as described below.

Note: When someone chooses your app in the Exchange, they get a copy of it, so they'll have the same problem if you just insert the new DBID into the link.

In formulas

If you have used a table DBID in formulas, make sure to replace it as shown below. When you copy your app, the replacement values will take on the DBIDs of the new app, and your formulas won’t break.

Replace the DBID with the table alias (visible at the bottom of the Advanced settings page in Table Settings). As before, you'll need to break up the string to insert the table alias.

For example: "https://myaccount.quickbase.com/db/" & [_DBID_PROJECTS] & "?a=td

In text sections and report descriptions

Have you inserted links pointing to locations in your app into:

text sections on forms or old app Home pages?
rich text pages?
report descriptions?

These types of links can be particularly tricky to handle. The destination URL would contain a DBID, like https://myaccount.quickbase.com/db/bgqza2vd7?a=GenNewRecord. (Regular links to publicly-available websites don't need to be changed.)

As part of preparing your app for sharing to Quickbase Exchange, remove or redirect these links, so that when your app is copied, no links in the copy point back to the original app. Depending on the circumstances, you could:

put the content you're linking to on a publicly-available website and point the link to that location, or
link to a file in a cloud-based document sharing service, or
make a relative link to a location inside a table.

To make a relative link, remove the DBID and everything before it from the URL. The link shown above would look like ?a=GenNewRecord after being made into a relative link. A link like this would tell Quickbase to create a new record in the current table (whatever its DBID).

Check for hidden items

Sometimes, an app may contain tables that have been hidden from all roles, or reports that have been hidden from view. Be sure to check the User Interface tab for each role for hidden tables. Also check the Roles and Reports Matrix page for hidden reports. Make these items visible, or delete them, as appropriate.

Add sample data

Create some sample data in each table, especially if reports from those tables appear on an app or table Home page. Sample data will show how the app will look when it is in use. Check the most frequently used reports, as well as each table Home page and the app Home page, to make sure they look their best.

If your app contains webhooks

If your apps contains webhooks, they will be removed when you submit the app to Exchange.

Take screenshots for Quickbase Exchange

Taking screenshots of important parts of your app will give visitors to Quickbase Exchange a better idea of the value of your app. If you’re doing particularly complicated things with your app, creating a PDF describing the app might be a good idea too. You can upload these files on the Promote Your App panel.