News & Blogs

News and blogs on our products, services, and events

121 Topics
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121 Topics

published in News & Blogs

Introducing the Thinkwise Container RegistryBlog

You might have noticed, there is a new menu item in TCP called Thinkwise Containers. Through this menu item it is possible to request login tokens required for downloading Thinkwise container images from the Thinkwise Container Registry. These container images can be used to deploy the Universal GUI and the Indicium Application Tier of the Thinkwise Platform in a new and easy way.But what exactly are containers and container images, how do you use them, and what are the benefits of using container images? What Are Container ImagesA container image is an application together with all the required dependencies wrapped together into a single image, which basically is a compressed archive. The application that runs from a container image is called a container.Compared to a virtual machine, a container only contains the required dependencies to run the application or service and is not bloated with other files. This makes containers very small in size and boot up almost instantly. This resu

Marjolein VerstratenModerator

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Quality Assurance in Product InnovationBlog

By Evelien Duizer and Marjolein van der Vegt-Verstraten Let us start with a question: Do you know what software testing means, and what a software tester or a software test engineer is up to all day? Let’s be honest, most people, whether they work in IT or not, would answer this question with a resounding ‘no’. But isn’t that a bit strange? For most professions, the average person has a pretty good idea of what the job includes. A teacher educates students, a police officer enforces the law, and a doctor treats diseases. People can even hazard a good guess about what software developers do. They create websites, applications, and video games. So what does a tester do? First and foremost, a tester is responsible for increasing and guarding the quality of a system. This involves a lot more than people think. A tester has to find out how functionality should work, analyze the differences between the actual and desired situation, create test plans and scenarios, analyze risks, report test

Bart MetselaarUI/UX Designer

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A new design: the Export Wizard in UniversalBlog

This is the first time we share a design as a standalone blog, to give you an impression of the things yet to come. This gives us the means to register feedback about a new feature in a natural way, which helps us to improve our product in the process. Our goal is to give our end-users a prominent place in our design process and to listen to their feedback in an earlier stage, so that we can work together to make the best product possible for all involved.Therefore, we welcome your opinion and are curious about your thoughts.Now, for the design at hand. We already support the immediate export functionality in the overflow menu of a subject. Using this action immediately starts the download of all visible rows without any further action needed.But what if you want to download a specific number of rows or want to download the data as untranslated ID’s?We are going to add an ‘Export…’ action in the overflow menu, which opens a wizard. This wizard lets you adjust your export settings, step

Renée EvertzenModerator

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Coming up in the 2023.1: Temporal versioning of the Software FactoryBlog

Although the 2022.2 version of the Thinkwise Platform has only just been released, we already have big plans for a major change for the 2023.1. We are planning to store only the latest version of every project and move all old data to history tables.The main goal of this change is performance improvement by separating the operational data in the Software Factory from the non-operational data. A secondary goal is preventing massive amounts of unnecessary data from being stored.In the 2022.2 and earlier versions of the Software Factory the version control was handled by making a copy of a complete model in the shape of a project version. This resulted in largely the same data being saved multiple numbers of times, whenever a new project version or branch was created. Since the changes only make up a small percentage of the whole model, this unnecessary data caused the Software Factory databases to grow over time and becoming slower due to their size.The change that is intended is to star

JasperAdministrator

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Which DB2 drivers should I use?Blog

The Thinkwise Platform provides extensive, out-of-the-box support for the DB2 for IBM i database management system for many years already. That is why we have a large number of customers that successfully use the Thinkwise Platform to modernize their legacy DB2 application landscape. This is also recognized by IBM, who named Thinkwise as Best IBM Business Partner of the Year in Europe in 2009, and awarded one of our customers with the Most Innovative IBM i User of the Year award because it used the Thinkwise Platform.However, IBM did (and still does) not make things easy for us.When we started, IBM was still in the process of replacing their Classic Query Engine (CQE) with the much faster and more powerful SQL Query Engine (SQE), and we have been in regular contact with IBM about bugs in these query engines that nearly drove us insane. With the necessary adjustments and bug fixes by IBM and some workarounds in the Thinkwise Platform, we were able to solve these problems, and the Thinkw

Anne BuitCommunity Manager

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Lifecycle Policy for Runtime Components

The Thinkwise Platform allows applications to stay functionally and technologically up-to-date. This is at the core of our mission.Free the world of legacy softwareTo keep this promise, we must eventually remove support for runtime components that use aged technologies or architectures. While they are supported, they may hamper further architectural developments of the Thinkwise Platform and take up valuable development time. Support for modern deployment scenarios, operating systems, and browsers becomes difficult and ultimately impossible.Most importantly, as technology ages, it poses an increased security risk. For any technology, some vulnerabilities may be discovered. While these can be resolved quickly for modern technologies, framework developers and component vendors eventually discontinue support for older technologies. This puts applications that use these technologies at risk. An application using the 2-tier Visual Basic 6 GUI. Support for this user interface was discontinu

Robbert van TongerenThinkwise blogger

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JSON examplesTutorial

All the standard indicium API's are expecting JSON and have JSON as output, also most of the 3rd party API's use JSON, therefore I think it would be useful to have some different JSON approaches and examples at one place, please feel free to add your own in the comments.Creating JSONWhen creating a simple JSON statement it would look something like this, this is without data from a table, but for example data you get in a process flow for 1 record and need to pass it to a JSON API.--Having an example variabledeclare @json nvarchar(max)set @json = ( select 0 as Value_1 ,1 as Value_2 ,1 as Value_3 ,1 as Value_4 ,0 as Value_5 ,0 as Value_6 ,0 as Value_7 for json path, without_array_wrapper)The output would look like this:{ "Value_1": 0, "Value_2": 1, "Value_3": 1, "Value_4": 1, "Value_5": 0, "Value_6": 0, "Value_7": 0}When you leave out the "without_array_wrapper” you will treat the set as an array and the result would look like this,

JasperAdministrator

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Customizing the Universal GUI using CSSBlog

We often get questions about customizing the Universal GUI, particularly the login page. We plan to offer several model-options to customize it in the future, such as the logo, colors, title text and background image, and to display maintenance messages, for example. But with the latest release of the Universal GUI, it is already possible to make these adjustments manually, using custom CSS! SetupStarting with the latest (beta) release of the Universal GUI it is possible to inject your own custom CSS to change the styling of various parts of the user interface.To get started, simply rename the custom.sample.css file in the public folder of the Universal GUI to custom.css. This file will then automatically be loaded by the Universal GUI. By renaming the file, it will no longer be overwritten with Universal GUI updates.Next, add your own CSS to the custom.css file and you’re off! CSS classesThe Universal GUI provides static CSS classes for a selection of elements, mainly on the login pag

Robbert van TongerenThinkwise blogger

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Logging with SQL temporal tablesBlog

SQL server version 2016 has introduced the feature of setting up system-versioning to tables (also known as ‘system-versioned’ temporal tables). This means that SQL server stores a history of data changes and deletions which take place within a table. There are various methods of creating history tables, but with SQL server you can allow a history table to be made automatically for a table. To build a test scenario, let’s first create a table called article. [code]create table article (article_number varchar(10) not null ,article_name varchar(100) null ,article_price numeric(9,2) null ,constraint article_pk primary key clustered(article_number asc) ) [/code] In order to create a history table, SQL first needs start_date_time and end_date_time columns on the table which is to be logged. [code]alter table article add start_date_time datetime2 generated always as row start hidden not null default '1900-01-01 00:00:00.0000000', --Can be anything, but has to be in the past. end_

Erik BrinkModerator

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Grid double-click task executionBlog

We are thrilled to introduce a great new feature. We received quite a few requests to apply some more possibilities to start user actions from a grid record, like we see also in apps like Outlook, Gmail, etc. Our Web GUI already supports grid links, where a column with a textual link can start a task based on the clicked record. We plan to support this feature in our Windows and Universal GUI soon too. In the future, we will also provide options to display the link in a nicer way, using icons and tooltips. More about that in a later blog post. Recently we’ve added a similar cool feature to the grids of our Windows and Web GUI’s: Grids now support a task to be executed when a record is double-clickedTo configure which tasks to use, the SF offers a new (model) extender, released in a recent hot-fix, which can be used to assign multiple table tasks to the double click action. The GUI will choose the first enabled task to execute. We chose to allow more than one so the developer can dete

Anne BuitCommunity Manager

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Introducing: AutoMLNews

One of the main goals for the Thinkwise Platform is to enable developers to focus on the functional aspects of software development instead of the technical aspects. To allow developers to leverage machine learning with minimal technical hurdles, we've added AutoML to the Thinkwise Platform in version 2020.2! Machine learning Machine learning combines software engineering with the field of mathematics and statistics to create algorithms that can learn from experience. To apply this in the field, data scientists use domain knowledge to apply these algorithms to create machine learning models that can make estimates and predictions based on the knowledge gained from experience. In applications built with the Thinkwise Platform, experience is often existing historical data. Machine Learning techniques in these applications are often leveraged for calculations that are difficult or impossible to express with regular code. Some examples include: Demand predictions over time Project cos

Erik BrinkModerator

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Asynchronous Task/Report executionBlog

Most of us probably have been in the situation where you wrote a time-consuming SQL stored procedure for a task or designed a report that takes a long time to create, knowing that your users will have to wait until everything is done before they can continue working in the GUI. The same goes for tasks or reports that are executed on multiple rows at once. Waiting for an hourglass to stop spinning is very boring so users will lose their patience and look for alternative ways to finish their work. You can put a progress dialog on it showing the users how long they will need to wait. But what if a task will take minutes or even hours? Maybe we would start multiple GUIs at once to split the work that needs to be done and visit the blocked GUI occasionally to watch the progress. We could lose some valuable time here not knowing exactly when the time-consuming action will finish exactly. How cool would it be when the user could simply continue their work after starting their action, and st

Dick van den BrinkModerator

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Using OAuth to get data from external applicationsBlog

The Thinkwise Platform has powerful functionality to connect to external applications using OAuth. Customers often use external applications, for example a payment system. In that case they often want to import the data to the Thinkwise database, as the external system is their single source of truth. We can use the Thinkwise Platform to synchronize this data. With the support of system flows we can even automate this to automatically collect the latest data.In this blog I will use Exact Online as the external application to synchronize the projects from Exact to a database.Creating the data modelI made a very simple model for demo purposes. As a developer you can extract a lot more data from the API.The data model contains two tables, the oauth_token_info table to save the OAuth access and refresh tokens. The project table contains the information we will extract from the Exact Online API.Data modelApp RegistrationTo call the API first we need to register an application in Exact Onlin

Vincent DoppenbergModerator

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Sign in with ... the choice is yoursBlog

IntroductionSince the release of version 2020.1 of the Thinkwise platform, the combination of Indicium and IAM forms a full-fledged authentication provider that implements the OpenID Connect protocol. This means that third party applications can authenticate their users through the Thinkwise platform. Starting with the next release of Indicium Universal (2020.2.9), the Thinkwise platform also supports authenticating its users through third party authentication providers that support OpenID Connect. This makes it possible to authenticate users through Azure Active Directory, Google, GitHub, Facebook and many other authentication providers.What is OpenID ConnectOpenID Connect is an industry standard protocol that allows for applications to delegate the authentication of users to a so-called Identity Provider. Common examples of Identity Providers are Microsoft, Google and Facebook. Whenever you see that button “Sign in with Google” on a website or an app on your smartphone, it means that

Diana KuipersModerator

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Monitoring Indicium live with Azure Application InsightsBlog

A lesser-known feature of Indicium is its capability to automatically log to Azure Application Insights. This service can be used for monitoring Indicium live. You can, for example, inspect failed requests, monitor response times, or investigate exceptions.Read the example below to learn how Azure Application Insights can help you in the development process. Especially when you don't have direct access to Indicium's error logs, having such logging capabilities is extremely useful. But even when you have direct access to the log files, the extra features offered by Azure Application Insights make it worth enabling it. Setting up Azure Application InsightsThis feature is enabled by default, but to use it, you need a paid Azure account with Application Insights enabled as a resource.Once you have everything set up in Azure, the next step is to find your Application Insights instrumentation key and add it to Indicium's appsettings.json.Instrumentation key"ApplicationInsights": { "Instrumen

Anne BuitCommunity Manager

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Revised creation and automationBlog

The Thinkwise Platform version 2021.3 has revised the way the Creation screen works, opening up more elegant ways to leverage tooling to automate this process.The generation screen consists of a number of steps:Generate definition Validate definition Generate source code Execute source code Run unit testsThis has remained unchanged between versions 2021.2 and 2021.3. However, the way these steps are performed has fundamentally changed.In the previous version, the steps in the generation screen were bound to a specific client. A developer would start Generate definition and the definition generation would be orchestrated start-to-end by the users client. This has served us well for many years, but there are some drawbacks that we’ve addressed in this release. The new Creation approachAll ‘jobs’ are no longer performed by a client, but are instead performed by Indicium. This means that generation, validation and such will continue even if the developer closes the screen or even the Softw

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Create your own validationsBlog

Too few developers create their own custom validations and solely rely on the default validations offered by the Software Factory. Though this default validation set is already great for higher quality, there is always room for improvement, especially in certain situations.Developers tend not to make custom validations for several reasons:The functionality is unknown Development itself has more priority Validations are not being used at all Developers think creating a validation is difficultTo stimulate the use of custom validations, we created a video in which we show an example. We hope this motivates you to create your own validations. Create a custom Validation in the Thinkwise Software Factory

Robert Jan de NieThinkwise blogger

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Check constraints using the Software FactoryBlog

In any application it is important to validate a user’s input.Is the value of the order smaller than the maximum order value? Is the start-date earlier than the end-date? Does this action lead to a stock amount smaller than zero?There are a few options how you, as a developer, can implement these checks:Domain (using min/max value) Default Trigger Check constraintA closer lookLet’s take the following example and work out if and how we can implement its validation:Is the start-date earlier than the end-date?Domain Validation through a domain is not possible in this case since we need to compare two values Default Clear out the end-date field and send a warning to the user informing that the end-date should occur after the start date Advantage: The user is being informed while the data is being entered. Risk: Business rule is only being enforced on the screens where the default has been implemented. When this data is created through other means, for example a task or external interfa

Sjors NiestenApprentice

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Release notes Universal GUI (2022.1.11)release notes

The release notes have been moved to a new area: Product updates.Don't forget to subscribe there!

Anne BuitCommunity Manager

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Performance troubleshootingBlog

At Thinkwise, we strive to make development and maintenance of enterprise applications as easy as possible. But in the end, an operational application will have a lot of moving parts. Performance troubleshooting comes down to identifying and resolving a problem in one of those many moving parts.Unfortunately, most of the time it ends up in a witch hunt. Kick in every virtual door to find out what causes the curse. This makes performance troubleshooting very time- and resource intensive. Today, I’ll share a very focused approach to resolve performance issues.The title of this blog might as well be: How to avoid the red herrings! Performance troubleshooting processThere are many ways to approach performance troubleshooting. This blog uses a certain script that can be used and adapted for your own needs. The script assumes a single, agile development team working on an application.The script for performance troubleshootingI’ll go into detail for all the steps, but I’d like to start off wi

Diana KuipersModerator

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Release notes Windows GUI and Web GUI (2022.1.12)release notes

The release notes have been moved to a new area: Product updates.Don't forget to subscribe there!

Anne BuitCommunity Manager

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Drag-drop of recordsBlog

When I leave my house every morning, I pick up my car keys from the counter and put them in my pocket. To me, this is a very common way of interacting with an object. I grab the keys, move them into my pocket and let go of the keys. But when it comes to our software, this would happen very differently. I would select the [i]Car keys[/i] record, put it in edit mode and change a field indicating the location from [i]Counter[/i] to [i]My pocket[/i]. I would then save the record and.. [b]*[/b]Poof![b]*[/b] – The keys are now in my pocket. Very unnatural if you ask me. Editing the car keys? I sound like a locksmith! This new feature, however, will bring our applications one step closer to the real world: Drag-drop of records! [h2]Model-driven drag-drop[/h2]As with every feature, the definition of drag-drop is a part of the model. To keep things as easy and accessible as possible, no new logic concepts were introduced. The existing concepts of tasks and corresponding context logi

Diana KuipersModerator

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Product updates/release notes have moved to their own spaceNews

Hello everyone,We have good news; the product updates (release notes) and hotfixes have moved to a place of their own! Of course, they still are a part of this community. But the new space offers the advantage of product selection. So, for example, if you wish to update the Universal GUI, you only need to select 'Universal GUI' for a clear overview of all its available releases and hotfixes.The area where you are now will remain dedicated to all other product news. So, keep your subscription here to make sure you will not miss out on the in-depth blogs about our services, products, and their features.You can find the area for product updates here. It now contains all the release notes and hotfixes, though we are still fine-tuning it. Don't forget to subscribe to the Product Updates!

QuidoRookie

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Deployment with DockerBlog

In order to easily package, ship, and run applications as lightweight, portable, and self-sufficient as possible, there is Docker. Docker allows us to run applications virtually everywhere. Therefore this blog post gives some guidance on how Thinkwise applications can be containerized.There are numerous approaches in how you might want to set up your Docker environment, so we will mainly focus on:Running Universal independently; Running Indicium independently; Running Indicium and Universal together.At the end of this post, we will uncover our future plans and what we're currently researching/developing. PrerequisitesTo follow along, you'll need to have:Docker installed on your desktop or server (for Linux containers); Universal downloaded from TCP; Indicium downloaded from TCP.Please note that for certain scenario’s with Docker you’ll need a license. The Docker FAQ is a good source to read upon these questions. Scenario'sThe scenarios covered here can be followed separately. 1. Runnin

JasperAdministrator

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Thinkwise Ideation Insights 2021Blog

Your input and feedback are incredibly valuable to us. That is why we devote a significant part of our capacity to implementing the great ideas posted and voted on by our amazing community. But how many of your ideas are actually being taken up?In this post we want to give you some insight into the number of ideas and votes that we have investigated, worked on, and delivered in 2021.Quick statistics for ideasSome figures about the ideas and votes in 2021:61 ideas delivered 🚀 252 new ideas created 💡 563 votes delivered 🚛 2029 votes added 💗Since the start of the Thinkwise community in 2019, we have managed to deliver no less than 23% of all votes cast! And this percentage is still steadily increasing, as the great ideas keep coming in.So once again, a big thank you to everyone in the Thinkwise Community who shares ideas and votes for other customer ideas. We greatly appreciate the insights and feedback you give us about our platform.Thinkwise Community dashboardIdeas we deliveredThes

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