News & Blogs

To make the quality of models in the software factory as high as possible, we use guidelines within Thinkwise for the data model, the user interface and functionality. You can find these guidelines here:https://docs.thinkwisesoftware.com/docs/sf/guidelines_data_modeling https://docs.thinkwisesoftware.com/docs/sf/guidelines_ui_design https://docs.thinkwisesoftware.com/docs/sf/guidelines_control_procs https://docs.thinkwisesoftware.com/docs/sf/guidelines_sql_coding https://docs.thinkwisesoftware.com/docs/sf/gu

Thinkwise Summit 2023 focuses on building sustainable enterprisesOn October 4, 2023, Thinkwise is hosting its third annual Summit around the key driver of transformation: the realization that ‘it takes more than tech to transform’. The event aims to inspire industry professionals on how to build a sustainable enterprise around the core premise that having the right technology in place is key, but also merely the starting point.Previous editions of the Thinkwise Summit attracted an audience from various countries including Japan, Vietnam, Brazil, Germany, the United Kingdom and more. This year, attendees can look forward to engaging keynote speakers, interactive workshops focusing on technology, business transformation, talent, and culture, as well as insights on building a coll

(Personal story)One aspect that I had difficulty with when creating control procedures, was making them work in a variety of scenarios. The way was to copy already created control procedures and templates and alter them slightly to match what needed to be done. Whilst there is nothing wrong with reusing great solutions, it becomes a problem when the model changes in such a way that each one of these control procedures had to be changed. Only at that point, it becomes obvious that this is not be the way to continue development.  Understanding control proceduresAs I became more and more familiar with the Software Factory, I began to understand that the Software Factory offers a solution I was desperately in need of. When switching the type of the Control procedure to SQL, it will allow you to take full control of template assignments and parameters. But to fully understand it, we need to break it down, let's dive into the definitions of St

As you know at Thinkwise we have guidelines for formatting our SQL-code. Because the guidelines were found to be a bit too extensive, we decided to reduce the examples. In addition, we have made some minor adjustments, so that they are more in line with the best practices of Thinkwise.The guidelines can be found here: https://docs.thinkwisesoftware.com/docs/sf/guidelines_sql_formattingGood luck using these guidelines!

When a developer creates a code template and assigns it to a program object, the order in which the code is executed is often neglected. This can lead to some serious issues, one of which we are discussing today. Deadlocks. A deadlock usually does not occur until a product is used in a production environment. Even though transactions are rolled back and no real harm is done, the developer will often have to solve the deadlock issues with great haste. This blog post will provide some guidelines on how to find and solve a deadlock. In this blog post, I’m assuming that the isolation level is the current default isolation level for products – Read Committed. How deadlocks occur A deadlock will occur when a transaction (A) is trying to access one or more rows which are in use by another transaction (B). Normally this is not a problem, the transaction (A) will wait until the rows are released. But the transaction (A) will wa

Free the world of legacy software; that is the promise that we make. This not only means that we empower businesses to modernize their existing legacy software, but also that we guarantee that newly created software never becomes legacy, ever.  We do this by making sure that all applications developed with the Thinkwise Platform continuously stay up to date, both in terms of architecture and technology. When new technologies emerge that qualify for use in the Thinkwise Platform, we completely redevelop the existing runtime components using these technologies, by first rebuilding all available functionality to guarantee backward compatibility and subsequently expanding on it with new features and possibilities that these modern technologies provide. The current cycle of innovation with the Universal GUI has quite some impact, as we are not only addressing the user interfaces this time, but the entire architecture of the Thinkwise Platform with the enhanced Indicium Appl

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. T

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Modern businesses require a short time to market to keep their competitive advantage. This means the software development process needs to be agile. In order to support maximum agility and especially when working in (multiple) teams it is smart to work in branches rather than work on the main model.In this article we are going to focus on working with feature branches whilst still being able to go through the complete DTAP flow and have the ability to apply hotfixes if the need arises.As a quick recap, a branch is a separate version of your application model, created from a specific point in time, that allows developers to make independent changes, fixes, and updates without affecting the main version. Branches are used to isolate new features, bug fixes, and other development work, and later merge them back into the main version when they are ready to be released. This allows multiple developers to work on different aspects of the application simultaneously, promoting

The Mobile GUI has entered the End of Life phase.As per runtime component lifecycle policy, the release of Thinkwise Platform version 2023.1 is the last version to support the Mobile GUI. In this blog, you can read about the impact of this change in runtime component support.ImpactAny Mobile GUI that is still in use today will continue to work. However, upgrading to any upcoming Thinkwise Platform version will not be possible. The Mobile GUI will not support version 2023.2 and up.Thinkwise will only provide critical security updates for about 1.5 years. When Thinkwise Platform version 2023.1 is no longer supported, the Mobile GUI will enter the End of Service Life phase. Note that the underlying technologies for the Mobile GUI are aging, security patches may not always be possible.Furthermore, there will be no further updates to support new operating systems, browser versions and such. The Mobile GUI may cease to function when t

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

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 tha

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 s

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. 

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)) 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:

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. 

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: Dem

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 start

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.

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 yo

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 

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   

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