Apps

Persistent dashboards, reports, and interactive views built by your agents

Overview

When your agent analyzes data during a conversation, the charts, tables, and insights it produces are trapped in that chat thread. Apps give those outputs a permanent home — a live, interactive page inside Aster that anyone in your organization can open anytime.

Ask your agent to build a pipeline dashboard, a traffic report, an audit summary, or a portfolio overview, and it creates an app at a stable URL you can bookmark, share with your team, and come back to whenever you need it.

Getting Started

1. Enable the tool: Add manage_apps to any agent that you want to be able to create apps
2. Ask for what you want: Tell the agent what you’d like to see — a dashboard, a report, a comparison view
3. Open the link: The agent returns a /apps/{id} URL. Click it to see your app

That’s it. The agent handles the data gathering, layout, and design. You just describe what you want.

What Can Apps Do?

Apps are fully interactive views, not static images. They support:

• Charts and graphs — line charts, bar charts, pie charts, area charts, and more
• Data tables — sortable, scrollable tables with formatted numbers and dates
• KPI tiles — headline metrics with trend indicators and comparisons
• Tabs and navigation — multi-section apps where you click between views
• Search and filtering — agents can build search bars and filter controls
• Responsive layout — apps look good on desktop and adapt to smaller screens
• Branded styling — agents use the same design system as the rest of Aster

Viewing and Managing Apps

Finding Your Apps

• Sidebar — click Apps in the left navigation to see all apps in your organization
• Direct URL — every app has a stable URL at /apps/{id} that you can bookmark or share
• Control Hub — the Apps tab in Control Hub shows the same listing with admin controls

All members of your organization can view apps. Admins can delete apps from Control Hub.

Locking Apps

By default, any agent in your organization can update or delete any app. Once an app is finished — a board report, a portfolio dashboard, a shared source of truth — you may want to freeze it so it doesn’t get changed unexpectedly. That’s what locking does.

• Lock it: Ask an agent to “lock this app.” While locked, only the app’s author (the person it was created for) or an organization admin can edit, delete, or unlock it.
• Everyone else can still view it: Locking only restricts editing — the app stays open and visible to your whole organization.
• Unlock anytime: Ask the agent to “unlock the app” to allow edits again. You can lock and unlock as often as you like.
• Unlocked by default: New and existing apps start unlocked. Nothing changes until you choose to lock one.

If someone else’s agent tries to edit a locked app, it gets a clear message that the app is locked and stops — it won’t overwrite your work. Locked apps show a Locked badge in the Apps list and in Control Hub.

Scheduled tasks and other automated runs are treated as trusted admins, so an app’s own scheduled refresh will still update it even when locked. Locking protects against edits by other people, not against an app’s own automation.

Keeping Apps Up to Date

Apps show a snapshot of data from when they were last updated. To refresh:

• Ask the agent: Tell the same agent to update the app with fresh data
• Automate it: Pair the app with a Scheduled Task — create a task that tells the agent to refresh the app on a recurring schedule (daily, weekly, etc.)

When the agent updates an app, the URL stays the same — users just reload to see the latest version.

Version History

Every update to an app is preserved as a version — nothing is overwritten. Agents can browse an app’s full version history and retrieve the complete source code of any past version. If an update goes wrong, ask the agent to look at the version history and restore an earlier version: “Show me the versions of the pipeline dashboard from before today and bring back yesterday’s.”

Use Cases

Analytics Dashboards

“Pull our Google Analytics data for the last 90 days and build a traffic dashboard with trends by channel, top pages, and device breakdown”

The agent queries your connected GA4 properties, computes the metrics, and publishes a dashboard with interactive charts and tables.

Sales Pipeline Reports

“Build a pipeline overview from Salesforce showing deal count by stage, weekly trends, win rate, and our top 10 open opportunities”

The agent pulls CRM data, calculates KPIs, and creates a persistent view your sales team can check daily.

SEO Performance Views

“Show me our Search Console performance — clicks, impressions, CTR by query, and which pages are getting the most visibility”

The agent combines GSC data across your properties and builds a multi-tab analytics app.

Financial Summaries

“Create a QuickBooks dashboard showing cash position, AR aging, and this quarter’s P&L trends”

The agent queries your accounting data and builds a financial overview with formatted currency values and comparison periods.

Competitive Research

“Research the top 5 competitors in our space and build a comparison dashboard with pricing, features, and recent news”

The agent uses web search and scraping tools, organizes the findings, and presents them in a structured comparison view.

Advanced: Multi-File Apps

For more complex apps — ones with multiple sections, shared components, or generated data files — agents can use a project-based workflow:

1. The agent builds files in a workspace using the code execution environment
2. It creates a small config file (aster-app.json) that describes the app structure
3. It publishes the whole project at once

This supports:

• Multiple component files — break a large app into organized, reusable pieces
• Generated assets — include CSV exports, charts, PDFs, and images (up to 100MB each)
• Data processing — run Python scripts to transform raw data before building the view
• Iterative editing — load an existing app back into the workspace, make changes, and re-publish

You don’t need to manage any of this yourself — the agent handles the workflow. But if you’re curious or building agent prompts that target this workflow, see the Manage Apps tool reference for details.

Combining with Other Features

Combine With	What You Can Do
Scheduled Tasks	Auto-refresh your dashboards on a schedule — daily, weekly, or hourly
Knowledge Bases	Build apps that visualize data extracted from uploaded documents
Multi-Agent Workflows	Have one agent gather data and another build the app
Database Integrations	Create live views of your Salesforce, Snowflake, Postgres, or QuickBooks data
Web Search	Build research dashboards with data pulled from the web

Tips

1. Be specific about what you want to see. “Build me a dashboard” is okay, but “Build a dashboard showing weekly revenue trends, top 10 customers by spend, and churn rate over the last 6 months” gets much better results.
2. Iterate. If the first version isn’t quite right, tell the agent what to change: “Move the chart to the top” or “Add a table showing the raw data” or “Use a dark theme.”
3. Bookmark your apps. The URL is permanent — save it, share it in Slack, add it to your daily routine.
4. Set up auto-refresh. For dashboards you check regularly, create a scheduled task that updates the app so the data is always fresh when you open it.