The Basics

Xano allows you to ingest, manipulate, transform and display data any way you desire.

The true power of Xano is its ability to allow you to ingest, manipulate, transform and display data any way you desire. In order to make the most out of Xano, there are a few basic concepts that are important to understand.

Functions

You can think of a Function like an action. A function can also contain a series of other functions (or actions). They range from things like Query all Records which performs the action of "Get all data from a Database table and return it ." to External API Request which performs the action of "Get data from an External API and return it". Xano has many pre-built functions

Variables

Variables are one of the most important concepts to understand in Xano. You can think of Variables as containers that hold information. Their sole purpose is to label and store data in memory to be sent to your front-end or used in another function.

Dot Notation

Dot notation lets you quickly access specific properties in a given variable. For example, if you had a variable called car and it was an object that looked like {"model": "toyota", "year":"1988}, You could access the car's model by simply typing car.model . This would return toyota. You will use dot notation quite a bit to access or manipulate data in the Function Stack.

Filters

Filters allow you to transform and manipulate data in the Function Stack. Filters work really well with Functions because you might pull a result from a Function (like Query all records) and use Filters to dynamically transform each record before returning it to the front-end. A good example might be "capitalize the first letter of each name in the user table before returning it to the front-end " and to do this you would use the to_lower Text filter on the table.name field. Another common use case is replacing a piece of a URL (www.api.com/{replacethis}). For this example, you'd use the sprintf filter

Addons (Like GraphQL)

Addons are a unique and easy way to enrich the response from a single API endpoint with additional data from other database tables. Addons were created to make it easy to get the data you need without performing multiple API requests. If you’ve used GraphQL before, Addons are very similar except they offer more control over how data is queried.

Dates & Times

The important thing to know is that Xano stores timestamps as a UNIX timestamp in milliseconds and Unix timestamp is a way to track time as a running total of seconds. Working with Dates & Times can be confusing because there are so many different timezones and ways to display the date and time to the front-end but our documentation will tell you the differ