Thank you for the followup.
I guess the easiest way to express what I’ve found lacking is that there seem to be no templates (or satisfactory documentation articles) that would show me how to create a straightforward UX that implements the usual CRUD operations. This is so basic—it’s the foundation of nearly any meaningful application—that I just can’t believe there’s no clear roadmap to follow. The demo apps that I’ve looked at don’t even implement an “add a new record” function…why? Don’t we all need to provide a UX to add records?
Other platforms I’ve used provide methods on components that simplify the implementation of these things—that’s one way of accelerating it, but not the only way. (While I understand that the query component offers a GUI aimed to provide more of a plug-and-play approach, I’ve found it limited at best.)
Another basic use case I’ve wasted hours on is coordinated display of tables, e.g. in a parent-child relationship. I’ve got it working now, but it took way too long to figure it out, and the components don’t seem to provide properties and methods that are “aware" of other tables on the same form. I.e., I can’t just hook table A to table B and have the component figure out how to cross-filter and cross-refresh. (I’m dating myself, but Borland Delphi made this SO easy, and that was a loooong time ago….)
The bottom line, Victoria, is that I’ve had to spend hours and hours hacking my way through trial and error (mostly error!) prototyping, bugging the support team and forum members with basic questions, and wading through unhelpful online docs just to piece together a really simple app. Maybe everyone is smarter than me, but I’ve developed software on many, many platforms since 1977, so Retool is not exactly my first rodeo. Getting up the learning curve shouldn’t be this hard.
To be clear, I LOVE some aspects of the IDE and very much appreciate the sophistication that’s gone into it, but my frustration level is pretty high when it really needn’t be. At this point I’m not sure I will continue with the tool, honestly, though I would dearly love to because I can see the tremendous potential.
It sounded like you were looking for a candid answer, so I’ve given you one. I hope it’s useful input.
