Viewing and compiling your first page

Learn how to view the compiled version of pages in your application

After reading this article you’ll know:

  • What compiling is and how to enable it

  • View the front end of your application’s pages

While building pages of your application, you may sometimes wonder what they will look like in the “finished” variant or just want to make sure the data table you’ve set up is displayed properly. Some changes you have made are not visible while you’re in the page builder overview. For all these kinds of cases, there is one solution - compiling, which enables users to view and check the front end and the functionality of their application.

The following example will illustrate the use of compiling functionality. Here we have a tasks overview page, it’s been created with a data table component. This table already contains some records, though they are not visible from the page builder and all that we see here are just a set of different components: data table, buttons, and dialogs.

Page canvas example: task overview

In order to view this page as if it’s already finished and exists within the website, you have to click the Play button in the top left corner of the builder bar.

The play (compile) button in the page builder

The compiled page will be opened in a new tab of your browser. Here’s what it looks like:

Example of a compiled task overview page

As we previously set up the button interactions, all functionality will work properly. The Add new task button will redirect us to the New task page and the Delete button will clear the task.

It’s important to mention that compiling is an essential process to apply changes to the front end of your application. Let’s say, you’ve added one more column to the data table and sent a link to the application for somebody to view. The change will not be visible unless you’ve pressed the Play button to compile it first.