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Create a Sales Order App

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Most businesses need to sell things to make money, and sales typically require some record of a contract to make them work. We'll use Canvas to publish a simple sales order app for our business. There are several sales order apps already in the Canvas App Store, but were going to create our own from scratch by clicking the "Create New App" button on the "My Apps" page.

We'll need a title and a brief description for our app. We'll call our app "Sales Order". The app also needs a description that tells people about the screens in the app and the data that is collected. When you have finished writing your description, click the "Save and Launch Designer" button to start adding screens to your Sales Order app.

The Mobile App Designer will open. You'll see a confirmation message "App was successfully created". This indicates that Canvas has created version 1 of the Sales Order app, and it is in a New status. The Mobile App Designer is a rich internet application that let's you drag and drop screens and fields into your app. Take a look at the primary elements of Designers user interface. It has four primary areas in which you'll work.

  1. The Toolbar is a row of buttons at the top of the page that let's you save or cancel any changes you have made to the form. You add screens by clicking the Add Screen button, and you can get help at any time by clicking the Help button.
  2. The panel on the left side of the page is a Form Outline that shows all the screens and fields currently in the app. The outline has a folder icon with the name Sales Order indicating that the app has been created.
  3. The panel in the center of the page represents the Screen that is currently selected from the Outline. Since we just created the app, no screen is selected. Canvas has been kind enough, however, to automatically click the Add Screen button from the Toolbar so that we can add our first screen. The Add Screen window has popped up in front of the Selected Screen panel.
  4. The Palette is a panel on the right side of the page. When you have added a screen to the app, you'll drag fields from the Palette to the screen in the middle of the page.