A Senior Software Engineer at Persistent Systems, Aditi Narkhede has more than three years of professional experience as a developer, including two years creating on Unqork. As one of Unqork Community’s most knowledgeable and active members, Aditi has been named a subject matter expert (SME) and is currently working towards her Professional certificate.
Q: Tell us about an exciting use case you have built using Unqork.
Aditi: Right now, I am working on a healthcare application with a very wide range of functionalities. Our main focus is solving pain points for patients, including the ability to make and update appointments with doctors online and a feature that allows them to fill out forms before the doctor’s visit.
What is it like to create in Unqork versus other platforms you have used?
Before becoming an Unqork Creator, I worked on the Microsoft Power Platform. With that platform, you have to create different chunks of functionality and then externally integrate them. With Unqork, you don’t have to integrate different application components, which makes it much easier to create end-to-end functionality.
For example, if I needed to send an email trigger to a user with Microsoft Power Platform, I would have to integrate three different streams. In Unqork, I can do it all with an automated workflow application and an API module, because SendGrid provides an integrated messaging service.
How does Unqork make it easier to build out the current use case you are working on?
As I mentioned, we have a very wide range of functionalities in our application. With another platform, we’d be really concerned about how many users are going to use a piece of functionality and how we are going to process all the data involved. But by using the Loops and Workflow functionality in Unqork, it is really easy to process the data required.
It is also really easy to send different kinds of alerts to the users. And if the business team wants us to add a new persona or role, and even build a customized dashboard for that role, Unqork makes that really easy too. Thanks to module-specific and even component-specific RBAC functionality, It is easy to keep access to the dashboard secure. The whole process, including adding the new role building and the dashboard, wouldn’t take me more than a day.
Security and compliance are obviously very important for healthcare organizations. How does Unqork help with that?
We can easily place role-based access controls not just at the application level but also at the component level. As a result, we don’t need a special security team to do all those configurations. It is really easy for me and my team to define exactly which users, and which types of roles within our organization, can access a certain page and what type of access they have.
How has Unqork improved collaboration with the non-technical teams you are serving?
We work in an agile way, sprint by sprint. Often the clients ask for changes, and Unqork makes it really easy to make those changes without breaking something or impacting other functionalities. That is great, because we can easily accommodate evolving requirements and give the client what they need.
“If the business team wants us to add a new persona or role, and even build a customized dashboard for that role, Unqork makes that really easy… The whole process, including adding the new role building and the dashboard, wouldn’t take me more than a day.”
—Aditi Narkhede, Senior Software Engineer, Persistent Systems
What are some of your favorite specific Unqork features and functionalities?
Unqork recently introduced Dynamic Refresh, which is a great feature in terms of improving the performance of our application. Since it launched, we have been layering the Dynamic Refresh feature into our application and have seen a big improvement in terms of performance of page load times across many pages. With Dynamic Refresh, only the required components are included in the first load of the page. Other components can be fetched only when required according to conditions you set. By doing this, we regularly speed page load times by 50-60%.
I also like the fact that Unqork lets you use a customized spreadsheet in your configuration where you can do conditional formatting. This gives me the option to do whatever formatting I need in Excel, and so I can maintain those templates easily. This feature is really amazing for reporting purposes. Finally, even though I don’t have a CSS background, Unqork makes it easy for me to do CSS and styling. Thanks to Unqork, I have developed an interest in doing some front-end styling because it is so easy, and that is also becoming one of my favorite things.
Do you have any best practices for using Unqork that you’d like to share with other Unqork creators?
First, I recommend taking a modular approach to building applications. In other words, create small individual components that are, for example, differentiated by role or some other condition. This makes those components easier to reuse in another application or another module, especially if you combine them with the Dynamic Refresh feature.
Also, make sure you include Error Handling for each API call. Otherwise, the user won’t understand what is happening in case an API call is failing during execution.
And don’t forget that if you have a question, you can always go to Unqork Community Hub. When we face any issue and are not able to resolve it by discussing it with peers, we just go to Community Hub. In most cases, we can get the solution within a few minutes. And when I have free time, I just go to Community to see if there are any open questions that I can help answer.
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