Marketplace

The Marketplace is a catalogue of ready-made apps. Instead of building an app from an empty canvas, you pick a template that already does roughly what you need, install it into your workspace, and change it from there.

You open it from Marketplace in the left navigation. Everyone in your workspace can browse it.

What a template is

A template is a complete, working app that someone has published: its data pipeline, its Visualisation, its Knowledge Base, and its Skills. Many templates also ship with data, so the charts have something in them the moment you open the app.

Each card in the catalogue tells you what you are looking at:

• The name and a one-line summary.
• Sample data - the template brings example rows so the app is not empty on the first open. They are there to be replaced by yours.
• Reference data - the template brings a lookup table it needs to work, such as emission factors or unit conversions. This data stays.
• A standard badge where the template follows a published reporting framework.

Click a card to open its detail page, which is where the publisher explains what the template does, what data you will need to supply, and how to read the result.

Installing a template

On the template's detail page, choose Install. Give the new app a name and a technical id, and confirm. If you may install into more than one space, choose the space the app goes into too - the dialog starts on Workspace where you may install there. Ovidens creates a new app in your workspace and opens it.

That new app is entirely yours. It is a copy, not a subscription: nothing about it is shared with anyone else, and nothing you do to it affects the template or anyone else's copy of it. Rename it, add nodes, rewrite the SQL, change the Visualisation - it is an ordinary app from the moment it exists.

Installing needs the same permission as importing an app, which comes with the App builder and Admin roles on the space the app goes into - and every member may install into My space. A template that ships data also needs permission to change data, because the install writes those rows into the new app's datasets; everyone who may install apps holds it. If you are missing either, the detail page's Use template button says which, before anything is created.

If the technical id you chose is already taken in your workspace, Ovidens says so and nothing is created. Pick another one and try again.

The data an installed app comes with

Two kinds, and they behave in opposite ways. Knowing which is which is the one thing worth reading before you start entering your own figures.

Sample data - yours to clear

Sample data exists so the app renders on the first open, so you can see the shape of the result before you have supplied anything. It is example data, not your data.

When you are ready to work with real figures, open the app and use Clear sample data. Every dataset the template filled with samples is emptied in one step; the datasets keep their columns, so the app's structure is untouched and you can upload or type your own rows straight away.

Clearing sample data, and bringing in an updated reference table (below), finish setting up the app, so they are offered to whoever may configure it: the App builder and Admin roles on the app or its space. Someone who only enters data does not see either.

You do not have to clear it. The moment you write to a dataset yourself - an upload, a paste, or a single edited cell - Ovidens stops treating that dataset as sample data and it is no longer offered for clearing. Your data is never something the app offers to throw away.

Reference data - yours to keep

Reference data is a lookup table the template needs in order to compute anything: a list of emission factors, a conversion table, a set of category codes. It is part of what the template is for.

Clear sample data never touches it. You can edit it if your organisation uses different values, and editing it changes nothing about how it is treated.

If the template's publisher later ships a corrected version of a reference table, the app tells you and offers to bring it in - see below. That is the only content that can ever move into an installed app after you have installed it.

When the template is updated later

Because an installed app is a copy, an update to the template never arrives on its own. What you get instead is a notice on the app: a newer version of this template is available, with what the publisher changed.

You then choose what to do with it:

• Bring in an updated reference table. Where the update includes new reference data for a dataset your app holds as reference data, the app offers to replace that table's rows with the current ones. One dataset at a time, and only when you ask. Your own data is never touched by this.
• Take the rest by hand. Configuration changes - a new node, a changed calculation, a redesigned page - are not applied for you, because your app has moved on since you installed it and only you know which of your changes to keep. Read what changed, and make the ones you want.
• Stop being told. Choose Do not show this again and the notice goes away for this version of the template. If the publisher releases another one after that, the notice comes back, because that is genuinely new information. Closing the notice with its X hides it for the current session only.

The app also shows you where it came from, so months later it is still clear which template an app started life as.

Publishing a template

Publishing is not part of an ordinary workspace. The catalogue is curated: templates are published centrally by Ovidens, so every listing has been checked to install cleanly before anyone sees it. If you have built something you would like to see in the catalogue, get in touch.

Related

• Apps - what an app is, and the draft-and-publish cycle every app follows, including one you installed.
• Datasets - uploading and editing the data an installed app expects from you.
• Export and import an app - moving one of your own apps between workspaces, which is the same portable format a template uses.