Overview — Screens, Database, Layout Settings, Use Cases

Featuring functionality from the popular business app, Slack — create and edit channels, create, send, and edit messages, and search messages.

The Group Messaging Feature Template comes fully created with the screens and database to launch a messaging feature for groups of people in your app. With functions like sending and editing messages, creating and managing channels, and searching messages — this feature template is like a lightweight Slack app that can be used as you desire.

Screens Overview

📚 Instructions Screen

Quickly get an overview of the template with quick tips, a help doc, and associated templates that may be of interest. This screen may be deleted at anytime.

User Screens

These screens will be interacted with by the customers or clients of your app.

💬 Messaging

The Messaging screen holds the main navigation, all groups of messages, and the main messaging screen where a user would create a message and send.

🔄 Edit Message Modal

Update or delete a message sent within a channel. Only accessible to the user who initially created the message.

🔍 Search Messages

Search messages by text across every channel.

📺 Channels

Search a list of channels to open messages within that channel.

🧵 Edit Channel Modal

Edit the name of a channel or delete the channel.

Database Overview

The Group Messaging Feature Template comes with a database that contains sample data. Each Adalo database contains Collections and each collection comes with the associated Properties. Any necessary relationship between the collections is set up, as well.

Important Note About the Database:

If you delete a Collection or Property from the Feature Template, this could impact the functionality of your app.

If you add a Collection or Property to your Feature Template, this will not impact the functionality of your app.

Below is an outline of the included Collections and their Properties. The Collection name is bolded and includes a description. The Properties include their name, property type (in brackets), and a description.

Basic Collections & Properties

👥 Users

The Users Collection automatically comes with every Adalo app. This collection will hold all the information related to anyone who uses the app. This information is initially collected from a user when they sign up to use your app.

• Email [Text] — the user’s email address, collected during sign up.

• Password [Encrypted] — the user’s password which is not visible to anyone, including Admins.

• Username [Text] — a user’s username, set by the user.

• Full Name [Text] — the user’s first and last name, collected during sign up.

• Channels [Many-to-Many Relationship] —this relational field shows that many users can belong to many channels, however, each user can belong to many channels.

• Messages [One-to-Many Relationship] — this relational field shows that one user can have many channel messages, but each message can only belong to one user.

• Profile Photo [Image] — the user’s profile image.

• Active Channel [Number] — the unique identifier of the channel that was last visited by the user.

📺 Channels

The Channels Collection holds information regarding to the available group message channels available for users to join.

• Name [Text] — the name of the channel.

• Messages [One-to-Many Relationship] — this relational field shows that one channel can have many messages, and each message belongs to one channel.

• ChannelUsers [Many-to-Many Relationship] — this relational field shows that many channels can have many users and each user can belong to many channels.

💬 Channel Messages

The Channel Messages Collection holds details regarding the messages that are sent in each channel by the various users.

• Message Text [Text] — the text associated with each individual message.

• Channel [Many-to-One Relationship] — this relational field shows that many messages belong to one channel and each message can only belong to one channel.

• User [Many-to-One Relationship] — this relational field shows that many messages belong to one user, and each message can only belong to one user.

Layout Settings

Each screen in the Group Messaging Feature Template is created using responsive design. The screens will look good on any device or tablet.

Most screens have been designed with Custom Layouts. If you add a new component to a screen, you might notice that the other screen sizes are impacted.

Layout Overview

To view or edit the layout for different screen sizes — click the Screen title to reveal the dropdown.

The default view for this template is Desktop. When you change the screen size for one screen in the Builder, it does not change the screen size of the rest of the screens on the canvas.

Hidden Components

In each view, there may be components that do not appear on Desktop, but are visible on Mobile. These are grayed out in the lefthand panel & denoted with an icon.

Another way to view which device components are visible on is the Layout Tab here:

Custom Layout

Some components come with custom layouts based on screen size. To view those settings, check the Layout Tab & scroll to the Custom Layout Settings.

Example Use Cases

• An app for your community that has varied interests.

• An app for your employees to keep information contained about your business.

• An app for your school to discuss several topics.

• and many more!