Find out the ways you can employ reusability functionalities to build faster with our platform.
After reading this article you’ll know the following:
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What pieces of functionality can be reused
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How to use blocks within your organization
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How to save and share page templates
In today’s rapidly developing digital world, time and effort spent creating new software play a crucial role. Therefore, platforms need to provide new means and solutions for reusing certain application functionalities. Betty Blocks provides its users with several ways of doing this, which we will point out in this article.
Working with blocks
Block Store stores different types of block components that can be reused in various applications: functions, pages, page components, data sources, and themes. With its help, one can share and install these blocks in their applications.
Being the continuation of Actions, Pages, Models, and Theme builder in a nutshell, these reusable components expand the capabilities of applications.
Sharing blocks
All custom functions, page components, data sources, and themes can be saved and shared within their own organization or even with other organizations. Here we are going to provide a brief case example of saving and sharing a page component, and also leave some useful links to other articles so that you can investigate the desired topics yourself.
Let’s say, you’ve created a new page component or edited the existing one, and want to share it with other builders in your organization. It is done in a very simple way: select the component from the canvas by clicking on it, then find the 'Save as a new component' option at the bottom of its options overview. While saving this component, you can also choose the option Share via Block Store.
After it’s been saved, you can open the Block Store and find it in your components overview among other card components. Identify it by a small Block Store icon in the top left corner, press it, and go to the block detail page from which you will be able to release the component to the Block Store and edit visibility, enabling others in your organization to see and use this component.
The following links will lead you to some ultimate guides to saving and sharing different kinds of blocks:
Also, check out the Public action functions list with descriptions to see what kind of functions (action steps) we have to offer at the moment.
Installing a block
When you open the Block Store, you will see the public blocks and the ones belonging to organizations that you are a part of. Each of the blocks visible to you is ready to be installed in your application. By clicking on any block, you will get to its detail page which includes the content and description. Press the Install Block button to install the block (like a component or theme) to your application. It’s also possible to install the block in all your organizations.
Installing a block article will help you understand the process of working with particular types of blocks.
Saving and reusing pages as templates
Page templates deliver the predesigned structure for displaying the contents of your web pages. Instead of creating a certain type of page yourself, one can easily apply something that already exists. Within Betty Blocks, you can use a number of different page templates by default (read about them in this section of the documentation) or create your own templates out of custom-designed pages that can be saved and reused by other builders.
Saving template
Let’s say you’ve spent some time and effort building a page in one application and you want your next to have the same look and functionality, then this option definitely comes at hand.
As you’re finished working on your page in the page builder, select the “Save as template” option in the top right corner of the page.
Sharing your saved page template
Slightly below the name and description, there is a Share via Block Store toggle. If this toggle is off, your page will be saved only as a template visible in your application.
Whereas if the toggle is on - it will be shared via the Block Store, but you will have to release it first before it becomes visible for other builders either in your or a different organization. After it has been released, this page component can be installed in an application.
Reusing styles
When working with page components, you can customize their styling as described in Unified component styles article.
After saving a single component style, you can use the Style dropdown to apply it to similar components that contain text, like Breadcrumb items or Card headers. This allows you to apply the saved styling across various elements effortlessly.
All in all, we consider reusability to be one of the essential assets for speeding up the process of application development that eliminates unnecessary and repetitive steps. No matter, if you build the application yourself or share it with other people in some organization, saving and sharing blocks, will increase the overall productivity and fluency of a development process.