Collections & Data Modeling

Model your platform's data with collections, properties, and entities.

Concepts

Collection: a type of record in your platform — for example, "Articles", "Customers", or "Events". A collection defines the shape of its records.
Property: a single field on a collection, such as a title, a date, or an image. Each property has a name and a type.
Entity: an individual record that belongs to a collection. If "Articles" is the collection, each article is an entity.

Open Collections from your project's side menu to get started.

Creating a Collection

Go to Collections.
Click Create and enter a name.
Open the new collection to define its properties.

Defining Properties

Inside a collection you build its list of properties. For each property you set:

Property name: how the field is labelled.
Type: the kind of value the field holds (see below).
Required: whether a value must be provided.
Validation pattern: an optional regular expression the value must match.
Max repeat: how many times a repeating property may occur.

You can group properties into sections to keep larger collections organized.

Property Types

The builder offers the following field types:

Type	Use for
Text Input	Short single-line text
Text Area	Longer multi-line text
Number	Numeric values
Toggle	An on/off switch
Checkbox	A boolean check
Single Select	One choice from a set of options
Multi Select	Several choices from a set of options
Date	A calendar date
Email	An email address
Phone	A phone number
Address	A postal address
Address w/ Country	A postal address including a country
Color	A color value
Image	An uploaded image
File	An uploaded file

Select and multi-select properties draw their options from another collection, so you can link records together.

Adding Entities

Once a collection's properties are defined, you can add records:

Open the collection and click View entities.
Click Create to add a new entity.
Fill in the fields according to the collection's properties and save.

If you change a collection's properties after entities already exist, any entity whose stored data no longer matches the current shape is flagged so you can update it.