Architecture of sharepoint App office 365 questions

Question

Hello,
This is my first foray into sharepoint hosted app for office 365.      Basically just a List with some fields and lookup fields (cascading dropdowns) ,  the supporting lists for the lookups,   and then another list with Children
documents of the first list.   
So just taking it to the simplest terms a few lists what is the best way to build this?    should I just create the lists and maybe a couple of content types manually in a site on office 365?    Should I create an App that has the list
definitions, content Types, etc?   Should I Create an app that has the content types and javascript necessary for the cascading dropdowns and then just create the list manually?    I'm just trying to figure out what makes the most sense.  
This is something we want everyone in company to use to submit requests for service so we don't want a bunch of instances of it all over our office 365 we just want to deploy it once.   Also need to be able to update design easily.     
So just being a newby to office 365 I'm trying to wrap my head around how I should put this together. 
Thanks for any input,
Brad

Answer 1

If this is going to be an app that you want to maintain with new versions then you should create an app that provisions the lists and content types. This way you can make changes to lists, contentypes and site columns in later versions and leverage the O365
infrastructure to automatically update the existing apps. Some links are here:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/dn265910.aspx?f=255&MSPPError=-2147217396
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/dn265911.aspx
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