Concepts
This help topic explains the fundamental concepts and building blocks of a Radzen application. All concepts and terms apply to both Blazor and Angular applications unless noted otherwise.
Radzen applications consist of:
- Pages that have components and properties
- Data sources
- Layouts
Pages
Pages represent application scenarios such as:
- displaying a list of data items
- capturing user input via forms
- visualising data with charts
Radzen applications start empty and the first step is to add pages. There are two ways to do that:
- Create a new page via the New page wizard.
- Scaffold a data source (database or other). Available to Radzen Professional and Enterprise subscribers.
New page wizard
To create a new page via the wizard click the Create new Page button. The New page wizard will display and you can pick one of the predefined templates.
Scaffold pages
Scaffolding is available when you create a new MSSQL, MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL or OData data source. Check the Generate pages for CRUD operations checkbox. Radzen will create CRUD pages for all selected tables and views. Radzen generates Add and Edit pages only for tables that have a primary key.
For further details check the Create pages from data section: MSSQL, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle.
Properties
Page properties are “slots” for data. They can store various things: the result of a database query, data entered by the application user or something that the application developer has specified.
The Properties article explains how to work with properties.
Components
Pages use UI components to implement application scenarios. For example a list of data items is usually displayed in a DataGrid component, the TextBox component captures user input. The charts visualize data.
The Components article shows how to use UI components in Radzen.
Data sources
Data sources represent application data - either a database (MSSQL, MySQL, Oracle or PostgreSQL) or a service (OData, REST or Swagger).
To add a new data source click the data button in the top right corner of Radzen and fill in the details.
In Angular applications you have to enable server-side support when creating the application.
After adding a data source you can create CRUD pages from it or use it in existing pages to retrieve data and display it.
To work with a data source use Invoke data source method.
Layouts
A layout is a special kind of page that defines the common look and feel of the entire application. A layout consists of components that are shared between multiple pages - header, footer, navigation, sidebar, company logo image.
Radzen applications have two predefined layouts - Main and Login. Main us used by all pages. If you later enable Security the login page of your application will use the Login layout.