Archived from the Bravo community forum (2021–2026). Some answers may refer to older versions of Bravo.
I'm working on my first Bravo and also my first no-code app. I'm a product designer and am comfortable with front-end development. But I have no experience with backend development, so I could use some direction.
I'm building an app to track a vinyl collection. The basic flow looks like this:
I plan to query the Discogs API to get the artist name, album name, album art, etc. And then, when the user taps "add," it saves that info to their library.
This seems like something that's beyond the scope of Airtable. I'm not sure what tooling I should be considering for the backend.
I have been trying Firebase. I have authentication working, thanks to the great docs. I've tinkered around with Firestore and have a basic `get` request working. Should I keep going down this road, or am I going to need something like Backendless or Xano?
I don't know what I don't know here. So I appreciate your patience with my noobie questions. Thanks!
4 replies
Hello Dave!
I recommend you migrating to Xano. This tool is much more robust than Airtable (it allows you to implement function stacks and business logic), and is more user friendly than Backendless.
Lastly, there are more tutorials in Bravo that use this tool, many users already have it, and customer support is good.
The only challenge is that Xano costs $65/mo.
Nevertheless, it’s quite of a learning curve to get up to speed with backend tools for designers like us 😅 But don’t give up! You’ll get it soon!
Hey Dave honestly for what you are aiming seems like firestore will work fine and its free tier is super generous, however it might be an approach that would need a bit more of doc checking to figure out firestore API on your side... for the scope you are describing Airtable will be fine too.
That said I agree Xano will probably be the most powerfull and "nocode" friendly.
PS: sweet UI I will be looking forward to using your app!
Thanks !
I've been using Xano for the past few days and it's really nice but definitely more than I was wanting to spend for this app.
I guess I hadn't looked around enough, so I didn't realize I could do Firebase authentication with Airtable as the database and only show a user their items. But the My Notes tutorial walks through the process really well.
One question that I have with the Firebase/Airtable setup -
Will I be able to search the Discogs API and then copy the values for the album the user wants to add to their library and save them in Airtable? I can see how I would do this with Xano because you can hit external APIs and then use function stacks and logic. But I'm not sure how to take the data from Discogs and send it to Airtable via Bravo.
you have two options here:
- Use remote actions. All the params you fetched on your GET at the card level would be passed down with the same name. Like shown in the images below:
- "+ button" should send you to another page/modal (as forms can only be used 1 per screen) where you will prefill the inputs with that album data and later send the data as POST request to Airtable.
You can "hide" the inputs if you will by setting them same color as the background.
Hope that helps!
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