I know that Appian may not be the best environment for this, but I'm wondering if this is possible.
It is possible to create a simple shopping site using Appian?
The table design is simple enough:
ITEMS- itemId- name- description- price
LOOKUP_CATEGORY_ITEM- itemId- categoryId
CUSTOMER- customerId- firstName- lastName- street1- street2- city- state- phone- email
CART- customerId- itemId
I've done this many times before in different languages/environments.This has MANY TO MANY, MANY TO ONE, aggregations and design/ui considerations with this project.I've deliberately ignored the payment portion/part of the project.
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I know of no reason why not. I'm not sure how payment collection / checkout would be handled (as you note), but I assume there's at least a chance some sort of custom / plug-in functionality either may already exist or at least would be plausible to handle that. And aside from that aspect, the rest could probably be managed via out-of-box UI elements.
You would probably even be able to handle a live, on-click persistent "shopping cart" functionality for a user with careful enough setup and use of a temp table (where the interface attempts to load any cart items for a particular user upon page load each time a new page is loaded). AFAIK it could potentially look pretty nice, though it'd be a lot of work.