Hey everybody, it’s Tim from Database here, and this is Build It with Tim. On today’s episode, we’re going to talk about how you can use ChatGPT to help you build and design custom components inside of your database application.
Now, I must admit that I am not an expert web developer. I don’t have any formal training whatsoever. Everything that I’ve learned, I’ve learned along the way. However, I do know a little bit of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, which is enough to get me by. ChatGPT is a tool that I use frequently to help me answer questions when it comes to custom code or low code solutions.
By asking the right questions and feeding some database data into ChatGPT, we can get it to build components for us inside of the database custom component. Today, we are going to use ChatGPT to build some social media posts inside of a custom component, so that you can be the web developer you’ve always dreamed of.
Inside of the data builder in our database application, we have three social media posts stored inside of a data table. We have collected all the information needed to place that data on a social media post, but we don’t have any way to actually display it as a social media post. We could use things like the list component and try to configure that to look somewhat similar, but what we want to use instead is the custom component.
The custom component allows us to create HTML templates with our own HTML, CSS, and JavaScript while retaining the native functionality of loading records from a particular data table. We’re going to add this custom component to the page and start asking ChatGPT our questions.
We’re going to choose the list type because we want to display all the records from this table. The table we want to display the records from is the social media posts table. When we add fields to the custom component, we are shown the field IDs. We will use this information to tell ChatGPT which field is which.
One of the advantages of using ChatGPT for the custom component is that it uses a public library called Handlebars JS. This library allows us to create HTML templates with our own CSS and JavaScript. I started by asking ChatGPT to create an HTML component that looks exactly like an Instagram post. It gave me an HTML document that contained both the CSS and HTML needed.
I copied this information over into our templates and also grabbed the CSS. I then asked ChatGPT to add a section to the post that shows who liked it. We have fields in our data table that store the users and user avatars of those who liked the post.
ChatGPT provided me with a new set of CSS and HTML to paste into our custom component. We went back and forth, pasting in new information and making tweaks along the way. We asked ChatGPT to make changes such as not displaying the liked name and overlapping the like by avatar in a single row.
After refining what we needed and asking new questions, we finally have a version of the finished product. It looks more refined and realistic with all the changes we made. We registered a custom helper to break apart comma-separated strings and create individual items.
In conclusion, ChatGPT is a powerful tool for building and designing custom components in a database application. It allows us to leverage HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to create templates while retaining the native functionality of loading records from a data table. By asking the right questions and making tweaks along the way, we can create beautiful components that meet our specific needs.
Thanks for watching, and we’ll see you next time! Take care.
