12 Days of Retool: Ten Retool Videos

Today, we've compiled a list of ten videos that will teach you something new about Retool. They feature a mix of new products, features you may have missed, tiny little hacks, and fun tutorials. So grab a cup of your favorite beverage, kick back, and get ready to binge watch some Retool tutorials!

If you’re new to Retool, and aren’t sure where to start, this quick 5 minute video is a pretty good start.

Just like the modules in most programming languages provide a way of organizing and structuring code in a logical and reusable manner, Retool Modules give you the ability to create a shared library of reusable components and queries that you can use in any Retool application. Any update you make to a module is immediately reflected in every app it powers.

Here’s a five minute video that provides an overview of Retool modules, and how to use them to reuse components across your application.

Retool Workflows is a new way for developers to build automations, like cron jobs, custom alerts, and ETL tasks. You can trigger workflows on event-based or recurring schedules. Think IFTTT for backend tasks.

💡ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) is a process that is used to move data from one place to another and sometimes to change the data in some way as it's being moved.

Here’s Jamie Cuffe, Product Manager for Workflows at Retool demonstrating how to use Workflows to automate tasks.

When Retool started, it was only possible to create single page apps that were isolated from each other. Along with the Header frame, the Sidebar frame makes creating complex interfaces simpler to create, and more intuitive to use for end users. The Sidebar frame can be added to any new or existing Retool application, and can contain child components just like the Main and Header frames do today.

Here’s Maya Guo (Product Designer) and Bob Nisco (Software Engineer) demonstrating how you can use the brand new Sidebar frame and an improved Navigation component to build flexible console-style layouts.

A sample app showing this design style can be found here, and you can import it into your own Retool instance to see how it works!

Retool provides a quick utility to generate a REST API endpoint on top of your CSV file. You simply upload your CSV file, edit data, and click to generate an API. You'll have an API endpoint with GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, and DELETE methods in minutes. Here’s a two minute video showing how it works.

In Retool, you can reference every available component and query via JavaScript. For instance, you can reference the currently selected row in a table using the .selectedRow property of the table. Here’s a two minute video explaining how this works.

Retool provides a bunch of ready-made components you can choose from to build your app, but if you have a use case that isn't handled by Retool's built-in components, you can build your own custom component to solve that use case.

Here’s a video that shows how to use a custom component to embed a Twilio dialer in a Retool app to make outbound calls.

Code for the app available here.

The missing GUI for Amazon's S3. Click on a file in the table to preview it, upload files, and download files. Also available as a template here.

This video covers how to build a form with multiple inputs in your Retool app. In the tutorial, you’ll see step-by-step how to build a form in Retool with the ability to both create and update records in a table.

Finally, here’s a two-hour bootcamp style video from our friends at Freecodecamp where Ania Kubow walks through step-by-step creating a Retool app from scratch, and integrating with Google Sheets, Stripe, and PostgreSQL.

Today, we highlighted ten videos that show you how to get more out of Retool. Hopefully, you found them useful, and they helped you unlock some new use cases for your apps.

Below, you'll find a list of every post from the 12 Days of Retool. Make sure to swing by tomorrow for our next post in the 12 Days of Retool series.