Docical Documentation

Getting started

Sign Up

You can sign up through Google or Microsoft sign in as well as through email. With an email sign in you will need to verify your email.

Organization

Your plan choice, organization name and country are a prerequisite for signing up through any option. The organization name must be unique. If you want to become a member of an existing organization, the primary account holder must invite you.

Number of Accounts in an Organization

Each plan carries with it a certain amount of user accounts that an organization can have without extra cost:

  • Basic - 5 accounts
  • Standard - 10 accounts
  • Advanced - 15 accounts

Free trial

New organizational accounts are entitled to free 7 days of use with some limitations which are:

  • 2,000 documents
  • 500 MB storage
  • 1 account

After the 7 days, the data will be kept if the user purchases the monthly subscription otherwise it will be deleted.

Additional Accounts

For an additional account beyond the following amount will be $10 per account.

The document Navigator is your way around your database. You can easily see the contents of each document, search, add or import documents as you wish. Another function of the Navigator is to connect to another REST API source to view or import documents from it.

In the search panel, you can search for key and value pairs, sort ascendingly or descendingly and also compare values in the database.

Add doc

With Add doc you can add a new doc through text. You’re free to structure your doc as you please while keeping a couple of things in mind:

  • user_id will automatically be added in the backend
  • There’s a size limit on each doc. Please see following list for document sizes:
    • Plan: Basic = 3,000 B
    • Plan: Standard = 6,000 B
    • Plan: Advanced = 10,000 B

Import docs

You can add docs in bulk through the importer. The options include:

  • CSV
  • JSON
  • Excel
  • Web API

When importing docs, each doc will be checked to ensure it is not greater than allowed limit in size. The user_id and org_id will be added as well in the backend.

Web API

Connecting to another REST API is simple. You can connect to a GET method of a REST API without any credentials, or you can connect to the REST API through a POST method with a username and password. The documents obtained through the Web API can be in any number of docs and will not be paginated. For this reason, ensure your browser and system can handle the load. Table view may not work as expected when obtaining docs through the Web API client.

Options selector

When you connect to an API using the Web API client, chances are there is an nested object that you need to access in order to get the docs. Common nested objects are data, results etc. You can use the options selector to selected which nested object you want to pull the data from. Note: a large number of documents may result in longer waiting times.

Document view or Table view

You can view your docs in two formats:

  • Document view
  • Table view

Document view is the default and because Docical is a document-based database, the docs will display in this format the best.

The other view is the Table view and more closely resembles a traditional database format.

Export

Your docs in the Navigator can be exported to JSON format. The JSON file will be saved to your Storage drive and you can download the file from there.

Docs

Each doc or document can be structured the way user prefers. There is no schema that is being enforced except for a couple of items which are:

  • The id of the document
  • The user_id of the user
  • The org_id of the organization

Although, the structure and schema of the doc is largely flexible, the size of each doc can be of 3,000 bytes for the Basic plan, 6,000 bytes for the Standard plan and 10,000 bytes for the Advanced plan.

Docs Quantity Limits

Docical uses a per doc or document basis for setting quota limits. Each plan comes with its limit for how many docs can be used before overages are added.

  • Basic - 100,000 docs
  • Standard - 200,000 docs
  • Advanced - 500,000 docs

Docs Overages

There are no hard limits in Docical and therefore the limits can be exceeded. Once exceeded, overage charges will apply to each set of docs over the limit:

  • Every 100 documents over the limit is: $0.01

Reserved Keys

Certain keywords for docs and their keys have been reserved to provide special functionality. The following are reserved keys and their functions:

  • _id and id: these are reserved keys for the identification of every doc.
  • user_id:this key is used to identify each user in the organization.
  • Database: this keyword sections off your database so that you have the ability to create as many databases as you want and thereby organize your docs.
  • Price: price of products or items in number format, not string.
  • Location: latitude and longitude coordinates of a place on a map.

Storage

Cloud storage is available and depending on your plan you can have either 5, 10, 15 GBs of storage space.

There is a storage overage charge for all plans:

  • $0.25 per 1 GB overage

Storage files don’t have subdirectories. Instead they are meant to link files to your docs because they have a predictable URL that can be either imported or done one by one.

Download Files

Files can be downloaded using the Download file button. These files are temporarily made public with a unique coded link. After some minutes the link will not work. To send a file to someone else or to make it public permanently you should mark the file as public.

Public Files

In order for you and others to view the file permanently, you must mark it public. Note: once marked public others with the link can see it and download it. The purpose of making a file public is to ensure that your files can be viewed or downloaded when accessing your docs. You can keep them private as well if you so choose, but the file can only be downloaded by you through Storage Manager. Once a file is marked as public it cannot be made private again. You will need to delete the file and then upload it again to have it as private.

Forms

With Form Builder you can create quick and easy forms to survey your clients or customers or to gain any input or insight from people you wish to poll. There are several different types of questions that you can choose from.

Each form, question and answer consists of 1 doc. There is one form that can have one or more questions and where each question can have one or more answers. Form data doesn’t show in the docs.

The live link can be shortened from a url shorter such as: TinyURL.com

Questions

Questions can be of several types:

  1. Short answer
  2. Long answer
  3. Tags
  4. Multiple choice
  5. Radio select
  6. Slider
  7. Date
  8. Rating

There can be a maximum of 50 questions in a form. Questions do not show in docs and they count as 1 doc each.

Answers

Answers are separate from each other and they take up 1 doc each. They do not show up in docs.

Reports

Docs

With the Reporting app, it is quite easy and straightforward to view current metrics by choosing up to four keys from the database from the Docs container. You can view the data in a chart of which type is available based on the current type of data selected.

For quantitative analysis, you can choose between some operations that can yield various data based on what you’ve selected.

For qualitative analysis, you can chart the keywords used and a quick summary of the textual data.

Forms

You can plot data for the Forms container much like you would from the Docs pane. Here you can select the form name, its question and then the pick a chart type to get a visual diagram of the answers. Keep the type of question in mind in order to assess the proper data representation.