Knowledgebase

typeflow can be used for various needs and thus addresses many companies’ departments differently. For instance, managers and executives need to ensure that their company can adapt to customer-needs as quickly as possible without technology getting in the way of business, content creators are interested in having a simple to use CMS that manages contents in a structured and simple way, developers want a platform that can be interfaced in all kind of ways using powerful APIs.

Some examples of what could be built using typeflow:

A transport company wants to provide a way for their customers to book and pay for “food trips” using an e-commerce system. A food trip allows one to travel on an old locomotive with tasty menus to eat. Each trip is composed of certain menus with a price and a PDF attached so that users can see what they would eat. They want to control the dates for the scheduled trips and of course a validator is needed to make sure that no one can book for a trip if there is no room left. Prices are dependant on the trips & menus and are managed as a field of a regular content. They want to handle different prices depending on the customer’s profile (adult, kid, baby). Upon payment, the customer receives an automatically generated PDF summarising all needed information. The transport company receives an email automatically and can visualise sales in realtime right from their dashboard. They also managed the cancellation workflow of a customer’s booking in which case a cancellation email is sent to the customer and triggers his/her refund.

An automatic Request for Quotation business process workflow. A client enters some required informations on a web form. Upon sending the request, it calls a custom Flow, creating a new content with the structured data and calculating the quotation based on the parameters that were entered. It updates the content with the computed price and sends an email to a manager for validation. Upon acceptance, an email is sent to the client who requested the quotation along with an attached PDF detailing the price that was generated dynamically by typeflow.

An architecture firm is working on an internal tool allowing their employees to view 3D models using an augmented reality headset. To iterate faster, instead of attaching 3D models as part of the AR app and re-building it each time, they use typeflow to store 3D models and create a custom Template describing contents in a way that allows to activate / deactivate 3D models from the typeflow’s admin interface, in case of activation it exposes the 3D model URL for the headset to download it and links the content to a Comment template allowing architects to give feedback on each model. A custom Flow automates the reception of new comments and notifies the team on a Slack channel. The development team can now focus on actually building the value-added AR functionalities and not the content infrastructure. Designers & Architects can easily upload new versions of their models and quickly iterate on those.

Absolutely! Here are some possible ways to use typeflow:

You want to focus on the frontend side and rely on typeflow as a backend-only solution with your own custom Flows. You use typeflow as well to manage all needed contents yourself since it’s part of the offering you make to your clients.

You want to build a custom frontend for your client while giving them access to the content management part because they want to keep control over the content side of things.

You’re building a full-stack system (frontend + backend) but want to reduce development time and costs by integrating your backend with typeflow’s Templates and Flow thus focusing on the more complex, value-added functionalities, of your project.

A Flow is a visual scenario describing the logic of what should be done in case of various events. Each Flow is composed of Nodes, a Node is like a small processing unit focusing on doing one thing. By combining them, some more complex logic can be created. For instance by combining the Content Event Node to a Send Email Node it would send an email with the details of a content whenever a content is created, modified or deleted.

A Template allows you to structure contents how you want them to be. It can help you guarantee clean data with integrity. Templates are composed of TypedFields which are attributes with a type (string, integer, float, media, reference etc.). Since we know the type, we can apply type-specific filters. For example you want to make sure the age input represented by an integer is superior or equals to 18, you can enforce this validation on the template level.

A Content is always dependant on a Template and thus represents structured data. Contents can ben created and managed by someone right from typeflow’s interface or can be dynamically managed by a third-party system through the API. Sometimes, you may even want to give Content management access to some of your users for only a few Templates while the other Templates, being more complex objects, would be managed by a third-party system.

Migrations allow you to create deployment scenarios. Let’s say you have your App deployed on production and everything works well. Now you’re being asked to implement a new feature for which you’ll need to create a new custom Flow for it. Since it’s a complex, tricky Flow to build, you prefer to work in a safe environment. So you plan a migration that will basically make a copy of all Templates, Contents, Flows and Media from PROD to DEV. This give you an instant copy of all the data being used in production. You create your new Flow and after a few back-and-forth you get the results you wanted. Now you can create a new migration that will copy your new Flow from DEV to PROD. If that new feature required to modify some of your Templates by adding new TypedFields, you can copy those Templates as well as part of the migration.