The new and improved Gadget data viewer makes it easy to find and interact with the data you need.

We’ve made it easy to manage, edit, and sort your data as you build and improve your apps.  Interacting with your data is an essential part of software development. Gadget makes your development experience faster by giving you a built-in data viewer with a real-time snapshot of your application data.

Small changes, big impact

While Gadget has always provided a basic data viewer, we’ve recently introduced some quality-of-life changes to make your interactions more meaningful (and less tedious), including adjustments to the language and layout. 

• Create new records - Add records directly to your database tables by running a <inline-code>create<inline-code> mutation in our built-in API playground.
• Use keyboard shortcuts - Navigate the table by tabbing or using the arrow keys, then Press ENTER to select rows, and DELETE to delete them.
• Search for records - Quickly find relevant records by leveraging our built-in search. 
• Sort your data - See your application data by ascending or descending in any column. ‍
• Delete in bulk - Select and delete multiple records, or clear the entire table at once.

A database for every environment, a data viewer for every environment

Whether you’re building your application in development, or running it in production, the entire experience is always in the cloud with Gadget. We provision a PostgreSQL database for each of your application’s environments, allowing you to separate your development and production data from one another. 

The Gadget data viewer allows you to specify the context, development or production, in which you wish to interact with your app’s data. Toggle the environment dropdown at the top of the page to filter the results to the environment you’re concerned with. 

In development environments

In development, the data viewer is an integral part of your development workflow. As you build your app, write code, run it, and review the results through the data viewer to ensure the changes behave as expected. You can also leverage Gadget’s API playground if you’re looking to create or mutate records.

In production environments

When it comes to production, the data viewer plays a supporting role when troubleshooting bugs and trying to rectify problematic records. Quickly search for the records in question, and inspect them to identify root problems that have resulted in faulty data. Troubleshoot, test, repeat. 

Regardless of the environment you’re in, it’s important to have a simple visual interface to review, search, sort, and change records.

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Ultimately, interacting with data is a core part of the development process. We hope these enhancements to how you engage with data in Gadget can provide a productivity boost to your development workflows. If you have feedback on these changes, or you think anything is missing, you can let us know through our Discord.