Developer improvements

Sometimes agileBase changes are made by developers, using agileBase as part of a larger infrastructure, e.g. interfacing with a website or third party applications, like accounting systems for example.

We’ve now introduced some features that will make that work easier to carry out.

Setting internal field IDs

Usually when a new field is created in agileBase, it gets assigned a unique internal ID. Usually this is never seen by anyone and is only used by the platform itself, but in cases where the API is used, like the integration examples above, it comes to the surface.

The automatically generated ID is just the user-facing field name followed by a random string of characters. However it’s now possible for administrators to specify their own internal ID when a field is created.

To do this, when typing in the field name, simply use a | sign (vertical bar) followed by the internal ID you want.


This becomes very useful when using multiple servers, e.g. developing first on a ‘test’ server, then copying the same work to a live server. In this case, you want IDs to remain the same, otherwise third party systems will need to be updated accordingly with potentially lots of field name changes.

This system will also be used for table and view names in future.

API error details

Another improvement to workflows using an API: if an API is called and there’s a problem resulting in an error code, the system will now output a message as a custom header, in addition to the error code and details in the body. This allows concise and potentially machine-readable error messages.

The header name to look for is X-AB-error.

Note this change is not yet live at time of writing but will be released with the next version, scheduled for next week.


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