Amazon Honeycode

Overview

What I’m looking for

How easy is it to create
Is it just as simple as Podio or Notion to get creating things
Is it going to be as horrible as Notion is to work with?
How does it compare to Salesforce for ease of building things?
How does it handle relationships (eg Salesforce spreadsheet importer conveniently ignores that databases have relationships).
- NOTE: I KNOW there is no cost comparison with Salesforce. Even with Essentials it’s expensive, AND Essentials just can’t be customised in this way. But with Salesforce you do get a lot out of the box - eg a Mobile App without doing anything much special.
How does it compare to Microsoft Power Apps (although I haven’t used Power Apps in anger recently).

Getting Started

I was surprised it was not an AWS login - you have to create a separate login for honeycode it seems. Oh but to have a paid plan you then connect to your AWS Account.

Start at https://builder.honeycode.aws/

It created my Team as Jodie Miners team when I would have preferred to name the Team as my company. So the first thing I did is change my team name - person icon bottom left.

First Thoughts

This is very much a table-centric view of the world. They even put prefixes on their table names to group them into logical groupings. It feels like Access.
- Whereas Salesforce gives you a Web Form and Mobile Form directly
Oh dear, I really hope Microsoft Lists is better than this.
Oh dear this is so raw and new, I’m not sure it’s ready for prime time. I now need to build something in Power Apps to check it.

Tables

You can’t LINK directly to the related data quickly and easily. You can get the related data to hover then you can click on the related record to view it in the table it’s in, but it’s inelegant. What if I want to view the details of that record in a form view.
The filtering is not bad. I like how it shows you the shaded rows of the filtered out rows.
I like the Sheets View - it’s more like an Excel spreadsheet or Access.
There is no help text available for what the field is about.
You can add a new field as simple as you can in Excel. This is good.
It has heavy use of Emjoi in the templates, similar to Notion.
I really like the simplicity of the linked tables, it seems a bit like Access but where you can build the links on the fly.
It is waaaay to easy to enter garbage, un-validated data.

Data Entry

OMG there is no date or time formats!!!
- If I format a field as dd-mmm-yyyy and I enter 31/12/2020 it stays as 31/12/2020. IT ONLY ALLOWS US DATES TO BE ENTERED!!!!!!
- From the Community “We do not support localization as of today”
- And if you type have the time format as 8:00 AM and type 8am it won’t format but type 8 am and it will.
From the Help Docs: “But, even when you set a format to currency if a user types “banana,” the value will be accepted and displayed as “banana.”
There is no required fields or validations apart from picklists
There’s no concept of saving a record. It’s just a value in that row.
There is no quick copy from above like there is in Excel and Access - ctrl+'

Templates

Field Service Agent

I tried a Field Service Agent template first.

Out of the Box Tools

A database is just a database. It’s only an application when you can do stuff with the data. Having these tools is really good.

There does not seem to be any merge fields available. Oh there is - you just enter an = sign to get to the fields. NOTE there is nowhere on the screen to tell you this. I had to find it in help.
Oh it is good you can view the table by clicking the arrow in the bottom right corner
It’s not easy to build an input with merge fields. It’s a combination of keyboard and mouse and you can’t just tab out of a field and keep typing.
There is no way to save without publishing - so no way to test things first.
It let me publish with an error but the error was not obvious.
Name your automations well because they are just in one big list.

Notify

Know the Formula Syntax eg Customer Phone is D_Customers[Phone](in Field Service Agent template). But it doesn’t work in the notification.
The link doesn’t take you to the direct new record, it only takes you to the app.

Add Row

Oh wow, you use Automations to save data back to the database - forms don’t just add their data to the database themselves, you need to explicitly write an automation.
OMG the Date and Time enters in UTC. It does NOT work with timezones unless you manually modify the data input. See help and here. But it then does not work for daylight savings!

Builder

Oh the apps are just ugly. Absolutely fugly.
No it does not make me want to use this app.
The mobile app is just the web app scaled down.

Form Builder

There is NO SAVE.
No conditional editabiltity but there is conditional visibility so you might be able to make one editable field visible then make the same field visible but not editable.
Some of the ways of getting to things is inconsistent. Eg Properties in the toolbar vs right click for screen properties vs just click and type for button name.
Oh no! I’m automatically using Access variable names - btnAdd for the Button Name.

Adding Data

You can’t add a Project for example as you are adding a Task. That is annoying. '
It is way easier to add dates and times on mobile.
It is way easier to enter picklist values on mobile than it is to enter text values.

Other Tools