AWS App Studio concepts

Get familiar with the key concepts to help speed up creating applications and automating processes for your team. These concepts include terms used throughout App Studio for both administrators and builders.

Administrator (Admin)

Admin is a role that can be assigned to a group in App Studio. Admins can manage users and groups within App Studio, add and manage connectors, and manage applications created by builders. Additionally, users with the Admin role have all of the permissions included with the Builder role.

Only admins have access to the Admin Hub, which contains tools to manage roles, data sources, and applications.

Application (App)

An application is a single configuration of pages that include assets such as interface components, automations, and data sources with which users can interact.

Automation

Built in the application studio, automations are how you define the business logic of your application. The main components of an automation are: triggers that start the automation, a sequence of one or more actions, input parameters used to pass data to the automation, and an output.

Automation actions

An automation action, commonly referred to as an action, is an individual step of logic that make up an automation. Each action performs a specific task, whether it's sending an email, creating a data record, invoking a Lambda function, or calling APIs. Actions are added to automations from the action library, and can be grouped into conditional statements or loops.

Builder

Builder is a role that can be assigned to a group in App Studio. Builders can create and build applications. Builders cannot manage users or groups, add or edit connector instances, or manage other builders' applications.

Users with the Builder role have access to the Builder Hub, which contains details about resources such as the applications that the builder has access to along with helpful information such as learning resources.

Application studio

The application studio is a visual tool to build applications. This application studio includes the following tabs for building apps:

• Pages: Where builders design their applications with pages and components.

• Automations: Where builders design their application's business logic with automations.

• Data: Where builders design their application's data model with entities.

The application studio also contains a debug console, and an AI chat window to get contextual help while building.

Component

Components are individual functional items within the UI of your application. Components are contained in pages, and some components can serve as a container for other components. Components combine UI elements with the business logic you want that UI element to perform. For example, one type of component is a form, where users can enter information in fields and, once submitted, that information is added as a database record.

Entity

Entities are data tables in App Studio. Entities interact directly with tables in data sources. Entities include fields to describe the data in them, queries to locate and return data, and mapping to connect the entity's fields to a data source's columns.

Connector

A connector is a connection between App Studio and other AWS services, such as AWS Lambda and Amazon Redshift, or third-party services. Once a connector is created and configured, builders can use it and the resources it connects to App Studio in their applications.

Only users with the Admin role can create, manage, or delete connectors.

Page

Pages are containers for components, which make up the UI of an application in App Studio. Each page represents a screen of your application's user interface (UI) that your users will interact with. Pages are created and edited in the Pages tab of the application studio.

Trigger

Trigger determine when, and on what conditions, an automation will run. Some examples of triggers are On click for buttons and On select for text inputs. The type of component determines the list of available triggers for that component. Triggers are added to components and configured in the application studio.