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Open an app

Goal​

Open an app that is installed in your current environment and start working with its data.

Prerequisites​

  • You are signed in to the Platform Shell.
  • Your current environment has at least one app installed — a Model-Driven App a maker has built, a Studio App a maker has drawn, or a Custom App deployed into the environment.

Steps​

  1. On the Apps screen, review the tiles showing the apps installed in your current environment. Each tile is one app.

  2. Select the tile for the app you want to open.

  3. The app opens inside the Platform Shell, keeping the top bar so you can switch environments or apps at any time.

  4. A Model-Driven App opens with its navigation on the left — the tables, dashboards and reports the app includes — on its home page. The home page is whichever of those the app's maker chose; when it is a dashboard, the app opens on live numbers rather than on a list of records. Choose anything in the navigation to go there.

    A Studio App — the tile says so — has no navigation on the left: it is a designed page, filling the window, and you move around it with the buttons on the page itself. The browser's Back button works inside it, and the address changes as you go, so a page you want to come back to can be bookmarked or sent to somebody.

  5. To open a different app without returning to the Apps screen, use the App picker in the top bar.

Home, and getting out​

Two things at the top of the navigation are easy to confuse, and they do opposite jobs:

  • Home takes you to the app's home page — where the app opened when you started, which may be a table, a dashboard or a report. It stays inside the app.
  • ← Back to apps, the link above it, leaves the app and returns to the Apps screen.

So Home is "start again from the front of this app", not "let me out".

Areas​

A large app can split its navigation into areas — Front desk, Finance, Reports. The left navigation then shows one area at a time, and a button at its foot names the area you are in. Select it to switch to another. Opening something from another area — a link, a recent, a pin — switches the navigation to that area for you. An app with no areas shows everything, as before.

Get back to where you were​

The left navigation has two lists above the app's own tables. Both start closed — the rail is for the app's tables, and two open lists of links would push those down before you had done anything. Select either heading to open it:

  • Recents — the last five things you opened, newest first. It fills itself.
  • Pinned — what you chose to keep. Select the pin on any list, view, record, or new-record form to add it; select it again to take it off.

They hold exactly what was open, not just the table: "Accounts on the Active view", "this one account", "a new account". So a record you are working through all week, or a filtered list you check every morning, is one click away rather than three.

Recents keeps five because it is answering "take me back to where I just was", and the answer is always in the first few. Pinned has no such limit: a pin is something you meant.

Each app keeps its own two lists — what you do in Sales never shows up in Service — and so does each environment. A new environment starts with both empty, because a saved link points at a record that only existed where it came from.

Everything inside an app also has its own web address. You can bookmark a record, send a colleague a link to exactly the form you are looking at, and use the browser's back button and refresh as you would on any website.

What happens behind the scenes​

An app always runs against your current environment. When you open an app, the Platform Shell grants it a narrow, time-limited permission scoped to just that app and that environment, so the app can only reach the data and actions it is meant to — never more than your own account is allowed. Switching environments while an app is open re-opens it against the newly selected environment.

Troubleshooting​

  • "That app isn't available in <environment>." — the app is not installed in your current environment. Switch to an environment where it is installed, or ask a maker to deploy it.
  • "Could not authorize <app>." — the Platform Shell could not obtain permission for the app. Refresh the page; if it persists, ask your platform administrator to confirm your access.
  • The Apps screen says "No apps are installed in this environment yet." — no app has been deployed to your current environment. Switch environments or ask a maker to deploy one.
  • Sign in to the platform.
  • Switch between environments.