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I’m so very new to Codea, Lua and coding in general.
I’m looking to build a customer relation manager.
Goal is to have the app include
Create categories for contacts by customer type
Collect contact information for a contact card
Have the contact card list types of purchases and history of purchases
Have the database sort by last time I dealt with customer, last time the customer purchased from me.
Eventually have it connect with email so I can sent clients invoices or renewal notices
Basically I want to create a custom CRM like hubspot or salesforce that would be able to connect to email service to attach emails to clients profiles, add new contacts through web contact forms, and be able to send emails to clients I have heard from in a while and or send out newsletters and promotions.
Future goal would be to have the app work as a point of services system (cash register) so I can track sales at a till.
I would like to have it compatible on HTML, WordPress, macOS, windows, Linux, ios and android, which I’m sure is possible considering lua can be cross compatible.
I am not looking for someone to help me build, I am looking for direction on where, or how to start this.
I can find templates in lua online for aspects of what I want to build, but pulling them into codea is not staging forward, I’ve tried pulling a few projects into codea from GitHub for game or app templates. But most don’t import for what ever reason if they were built in lua, and not codea
Any help much appreciated!!
Thanks,
Travisbevan.com
Comments
@TravisBevan Codea is more for creating games then business applications. I’m not saying it can’t be done, it’s just going to be a lot of work. Codea doesn’t have database code, but that doesn’t mean you can’t write your own.
Thanks for the input @dave1707 , I am still trying to figure what would be best to build it in, even if I use Lua as a interface and run the database in something else.
http://lua.sqlite.org/index.cgi/index
@TravisBevan Just in case you’re still looking for database code, here’s a limited example I have. This will give you an idea of the amount of code that’s required for something simple. There aren’t any edit checks, so it might crash at times. To input something, just tap on a field. Tap on Save to save the info. Tap Read to look at the entries. Tap Delete to delete an entry. The info is saved as a text file in the Dropbox folder. You can change the code to add or delete the number of input fields or change their names.
You could totaly do this with Codea. BUT
In your case, I would first create a web application with, say e.g., php for the server side and html / css / javascript for the client side. If you then still need a native iOS app for whatever reason, you could still extend the server with REST API's. These are simply URL's that you can call as an admin to e.g. create new users and save and read other information. In Codea you could then create an user-friendly interface that simply calls these REST endpoints when you interact with the app.
This is a veeery broad topic actually.
However, you could also create everything in Lua instead if you prefer, using a Linux Server and Codea. You could even use MySQL as your database and talk directly to it through Codea (instead of using the REST API). I published an adapter for this some time ago
But honestly speaking, I'd never use a native app for something like your idea. Because HTML and JavaScript is future. And the more cross-platform you want to be, the more you should think about web technologies.