News & Blogs

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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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.

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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

Hi everyone,We previously explained how the Thinkwise Platform version 2021.3 revised the way creation and automation works.In the Thinkwise Platform version 2022.1, we also revised the way the Synchronization to IAM (Intelligent Application Manager) and Deployment package screens work, allowing for seamless integration in CI/CD tools that many have been waiting for.The Synchronization and Deployment processes are the final two processes that now have been made to fully run via Indicium and therefore can be initialized via Indicium's API. More on that later in this blog.In the previous version, the steps in these screens were bound to a specific client. A developer would start to Synchronize to IAM and the synchronization would be orchestrated start-to-end by the user’s client. This also applies for th

The Thinkwise Platform supports various types of report generation solutions. The choice for a certain type of reporting has functional implications. For instance, not all reporting solutions support the usage of sub-reports. Other reporting solutions may offer more features regarding the use of SVG images or HTML markup.There are also non-functional aspects to consider. License costs is often noted. Another important aspect is the portability of the reports. Not every type of report can run on both Windows and Linux environments.Quite some research has gone into the portability of the usage of Crystal Reports lately. We’d like to share some of our findings in this blog.Runtime installationAdministrators who have deployed applications using Crystal Reports know that it requires the installation of the Crystal Reports runtime. Either on the desktop clients when the Windows GUI is used or on the web server when the reports are generated b