Overview of Application Configuration and Extension

By default, the application provides robust functionality, tailored to support most of the business requirements an organization could have. But you can still make changes to your application to best fit your specific business or personal needs.

Types of Changes

The types of change you can make depend on whether you're an administrator or a user, the pages you're changing, and who you're making the changes for.

• Configuration: These changes are made by administrators, and such changes affect many users. For example, you might hide some menu items in the Navigator, or create a new page for all users.

• Application Extension: These changes are made by one or more application developers and administrators using Visual Builder Studio, and such changes affect all users. For example, you may want to add a new field to a table, or rearrange the fields in a form. There's one application extension for each base application, which many people contribute to.

• Personalization: These changes are made by individual users, and they affect only the users who made the changes. As an administrator, you can't make personalizations for any specific user. Personalizations are also limited to certain types of changes, such as hiding infolets or resizing table columns.

Note: Configurations, application extensions, and personalizations are preserved when you move on to a newer release update.

Here's a visual representation of how changes are categorized.

What You Can Change

When you make a change to the data model, that change is available to other aspects of the application. For example, after you add an attribute to an object, you can use that attribute in these related artifacts:

• Web-based view page

• Associated mobile page

• Associated reports

Generally, you use Application Composer to change the data model. You can then reflect those changes in the UI by using Visual Builder Studio, Page Composer, or Application Composer. If you see the Edit Page in Visual Builder Studio option in the Settings and Actions menu of a page, you know that you must use Visual Builder Studio to edit that page.

Note: Click your user image or name in the global header to open the Settings and Actions menu.

For information about configuring business intelligence, see the Creating and Editing Analytics and Reports guides relevant to your products.