Product updates
Ideas
Groups
E-learning
Documentation
Events

Community
Thinkwise Platform
News & Blogs

News & Blogs

News and blogs on our products, services, and events

144 Topics
272 Replies

When you subscribe we will email you when there is a new topic in this category

144 Topics

Newest first

Recently active Most replies Most views

Moller TomaCaptain

posted in News & Blogs

Watch the Thinkwise Release Event 2020.2 - Recording

published in News & Blogs

Varbinary issue in SQL Server Management Studio

Varbinary issue SQL Server Management Studio doesn't handle very long strings and varbinaries very well in the query window. It hangs for several seconds as you try to scroll over that line. And in fact, some versions will even display a warning about long lines when opening a script that has at least one line over a certain length. In the Thinkwise Platform this is a problem when you want to synchronize your project version to IAM with a script. This script can contain long varbinary values, used for pictures and documents. This has always been a potential issue, but from version 2020.2 of the Thinkwise Platform files like icons and reports are stored in the database. Which makes it a lot more likely that you will encounter this. In SQL Server there is a way to split up these long varbinary values, by using line-continuation in T-SQL via the backslash character. This could avoid the problem. However, we don't want to go this way because: 1. Splitting up varbinary values is very ti

Anne BuitCommunity Manager

published in News & Blogs

Automatic license renewalNews

In an effort to make deployment easier for everyone, we've updated the license mechanism in the Thinkwise Platform. Downloading and importing a license will be a thing of the past as of version 2020.2. As mentioned before, Indicium Universal will be a mandatory component in any environment. Not only to be able to use Universal, Scheduling and AutoML, but also for the automatic license renewal mechanism. Indicium Universal will automatically renew licenses for environments without the need for any user interaction. Furthermore, the innovation fee report in IAM has been removed from the Intelligent Application Manager - the contents of this report will be exchanged when renewing the license. The expression environment will be used a lot in this blog. This expression is used to denote an Intelligent Application Manager with the applications present in this IAM and all runtime components attached, such as Indicium Universal, GUI's, etc. Unregistered environments By default, all envir

Anne BuitCommunity Manager

published in News & Blogs

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

Peter VerwijsModerator

published in News & Blogs

Breakpoints for a responsive User Experience on every platformBlog

When we started development on our new Universal GUI, one of our main goals was to create a User Interface that worked well on all platforms, be it desktop, tablet or mobile. This feature was so important to us that it even inspired the name. One important distinction between all these platforms is the amount of available screen real estate, or in other words the amount of pixels on a screen that you have to work with. Something that works great on a desktop client might not look so hot when it’s all mashed together on a mobile device. And resizing certain elements on the screen can drastically impact how useful certain screen elements are. Resizing the form on a screen can make it so that the grid that was displaying so much information before now only shows a handful of columns. To make sure everything looks the way you want it to, the Universal GUI makes use of breakpoints. This means that when the screen size or the size of a screen element hits a certain width threshold the comp

EsterModerator

published in News & Blogs

Generation has been started

I’m going to generate this project! Where are my program objects, oh, it’s generating…. Does this sound familiar? In the 2020.2 release, we will introduce a cool new feature to send notification emails when generating a project. To receive these emails, an email address can be provided. Best practices will be to use a group email address to notify all team members working on the project. Microsoft Teams offers an easy solution for group emails. Every channel within MS Teams has a unique email address which can be retrieved by right-clicking on the channel. This email address can be used to send the notifications emails to the channel. The notifications will pop up on the channel as follows: Generation start and finishThe notification email will be sent at the start and finish of definition and source code generation. When generation is quick and finished before the start-email has been sent, this email won't be sent at all. It's no use to notify that a certain version was l

Peter VerwijsModerator

published in News & Blogs

Storing icons and reports in the databaseBlog

When creating an application, using icons is an important part of the user experience. Likewise, reports can add a lot in terms of BI. Up until now these files have always had to reside on the file system, which can bring some added hassles during deployment. The files needed to be present in the correct location, all users needed the appropriate rights to access these locations and after deployment IAM always had to be pointed to the right location to be able to find the files. With the release of version 2020.2 of the SF and IAM we’ve taken some steps to relieve these issues. Starting with 2020.2, icons and reports will be stored as BLOBs in the database. This means that whenever the database is deployed, all icons and reports will automatically be deployed with it and the SF and IAM will instantly have access to them. Icon overview screen Uploading files to the database After upgrading to 2020.2 you will need to upload all images and reports from the file system to the datab

published in News & Blogs

IAM 2020.2: Auditing and LoggingBlog

Many organizations elect to audit access to provide insight into application usage and potential security issues. In the Intelligent Application Manager (IAM) version 2020.2 a logging mechanism is introduced which makes these audits possible. Auditing The purpose of auditing is to be able to see which user had access to a certain object in one of the applications at a certain time. To access this information, an Auditing group is present in the Advanced menu, which includes an Access Analysis menu item. The corresponding screen looks like this: Access analysis A filter is included at the top of the screen. In this filter you can enter a Audit period from and a Audit period to in the Period section. IAM will then calculate what the maximum access rights of a user are for a specific object in a specific application during that period. The results of this calculation can be found in the tabs in the bottom half of the screen. A tab is available for each object that can be authorized.

Erwin EkkelModerator

published in News & Blogs

How to improve SQL management studio usabilityBlog

SQL server management studio is the tool to use for creating SQL scripts and for database management. However to make optimal use of SSMS you might want to adjust the default settings. Below are several tips to increase the user experience of SSMS. Please note the following tips are based on SSMS 2017, other versions might not have some of these options or the settings can be found in a different menu. Custom connection colors With the basic settings each connection has the exact same look and feel. On the bottom there is a yellow bar with connection details. When working on several SQL servers or instances at the same time this can get very confusing if all the screens look the same. To improve distinctiveness between connections there is the option to give each server connection its own distinct color for the connection bar. Below you can see an example where the local server has the color green assigned to it. The color settings are adjustable per SSMS and per SQL server (instan

Vincent DoppenbergModerator

published in News & Blogs

Resource Staging

In an earlier blog post, we wrote that some of Indicium Universal's APIs were more complicated than their counterparts in the ‘regular’ version of Indicium. It was hinted at that the reason for this difference was related to security improvements and that we were looking into ways to simplify them. This is important to us because we want everyone to use Indicium Universal as much as possible due to its improved security and it would be a shame if its more complicated APIs would be a deterrent. As of version 2020.1.1 of Indicium Universal, we have combined the best of both worlds; simple and secure APIs. The APIs of Indicium Universal are now as simple as they used to be without giving up on any security or data integrity checks. In this blog we want to give more background information on why we needed to complicate the APIs in the first place and how we managed to simplify them again. In doing so, we want to shed more light on what Indicium does behind the scenes, which challenges we f

Moller TomaCaptain

published in News & Blogs

Thinkwise carries on its service as usual

Dear Thinkwise Relation, First, I wish you and your loved ones good health in this very unusual and difficult time. In order to protect our employees and relations against contamination with the Coronavirus, Thinkwise has taken several measures that are in line with the recommendations made by the government. This means that: Work in our office buildings is being limited; Employees are working from home as much as possible using online tools and telephone; Our projects will continue as usual; Support is still readily available. Thank you very much for your understanding and cooperation. Moller Toma (community manager)

Moller TomaCaptain

posted in News & Blogs

Thinkwise release event 2020.1

Robert Jan de NieThinkwise blogger

published in News & Blogs

Using query store to analyse performanceBlog

Have you ever had a system slow down and everybody waiting for you to fix it? Or wondered what happened in the database an hour ago? Or been curious what impact a change in your query had to the speed of execution? Or been confused about how to best monitor database performance? Let's talk about a way to answer the above questions using the Query Store that is being provided in SQL Server since SQL Server 2016. This is not going to be an in-depth view of all the features of the query store but merely to make you aware it exists, the way I use it and some of the key benefits. If you are looking for a detailed analysis of the complete feature set, please refer to the Microsoft documentation. First thing we need to do is enable the query store, fortunately, this is very easy. Navigate to database properties Select ‘query store’ on the left hand panel Set the operation mode of the query store to 'Read Write' Click OK Hit refresh on your database in the Object Explorer Verify there is an ex

JasperAdministrator

published in News & Blogs

SVGs, continuedBlog

About a year ago we added SVG support to the Windows and Web GUIs. SVG images have the advantage that they can be scaled better than bitmap images and that it is easier to adjust, for example, the color of (parts of) an image. This is used extensively by the Universal GUI to match the color of icons to the chosen light or dark theme.Colored iconsWith the latest 2019.2 release of the Windows and Web GUIs, this feature has also been added to these GUIs.The Windows and Web GUI will now adjust the color of SVG icons to the theme color of the corresponding label, making it no longer necessary to add the same icon in different colors to the model. This was often done for tile menus or detail tiles, which usually use a dark tile color with light icons.SVG icons use the same color as their labelAdjusting the color is done automatically for elements in SVG images that have a fill style but no color set, or where the color is set to black (#000000).(And yes, we can do that, because it's never a

Marcel ZuurModerator

published in News & Blogs

Time-series forecasting using R with fableBlog

In my previous blog I showed you how you can create a neural network to predict the hardenability of steel. This was done with the help of R and Keras. I also showed you how R functionality can be integrated in SQL templates. This time I will cover the subject of forecasting and how this can be done using R. Since integrating R code in SQL templates always follows the same procedure, I will not be covering that subject again in this blog. The main goal here is to show you some of the possibilities R has to offer regarding forecasting. I will show you how to prepare a dataset, fit different types of models to your data, using those models to forecast, visualize your results, and calculate evaluation metrics. [h3]Forecasting[/h3]Forecasting is a method of predicting the future based on past data. For example, company X has kept track of all sales orders of product Y for the last 2 years and wants to predict next month's demand for Y. A simple method that company X can use is to sum up

Anne BuitCommunity Manager

published in News & Blogs

Modular releases

Thinkwise Platform 2019.2 will ship with a new feature to aid independent software vendors in releasing applications using a module-based licensing model. A module is a bundle of functionality that can be released separately from other modules. They can be large such as [i]HR, Purchasing[/i] or [i]Production.[/i] Alternatively, they can be smaller modules with only a few tasks such as [i]Promotions.[/i] Modules can also be add-ons to existing modules such as [i]Purchasing analytics[/i]. There are no constraints imposed by the Software Factory when it comes to the size of a module or dependencies between modules. [h3][b]What defines a module?[/b][/h3] One of the major decisions we had to make was on how to limit the application based on a set of selected modules. We could limit the database objects to those relevant to the selected modules. But this strategy has some caveats: [list] [*]Developers would have to tag the module(s) for every single database object. [*]Dependencies in t

Robbert van TongerenThinkwise blogger

published in News & Blogs

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_

Moller TomaCaptain

published in News & Blogs

Community Badges - part two

You've got to catch them all! :rocket: Badges that can be earned by [i]best answers in all subforums.[/i] [img]https://uploads-eu-west-1.insided.com/thinkwise-en/attachment/4cadfe20-4346-466e-a2e4-1d8e89e96fc2.png[/img] Badges that can be earned in the subforum [i]Deployment.[/i] [img]https://uploads-eu-west-1.insided.com/thinkwise-en/attachment/39a13007-7aea-46f1-a4e1-e12db8b09a2e.png[/img] Badges that can be earned in the subforum [i]Integration.[/i] [img]https://uploads-eu-west-1.insided.com/thinkwise-en/attachment/a2030f58-f114-4ccb-b974-fdc4c328462f.png[/img] Badges that can be earned in the subforum [i]Blogs.[/i] [img]https://uploads-eu-west-1.insided.com/thinkwise-en/attachment/988cded8-6217-4300-94de-4aca77cb956d.png[/img] [b]let the games begin! [/b]

Erik BrinkModerator

published in News & Blogs

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

Vincent DoppenbergModerator

published in News & Blogs

Indicium vs. Indicium Universal

As some of you may have already noticed by looking at the Thinkwise products in TCP, we have recently decided to split Indicium up into two separate products. In this blog post I will give a short explanation of our reasoning and what this change means for you. [h2]Why did we split Indicium up into two products?[/h2] The new Indicium product in TCP is called [i]Indicium Universal[/i]. The name already implies that this version of Indicium is meant for our new Universal GUI, which is currently in development. The reason that the Universal GUI requires a different version of Indicium than our existing GUIs has to do with the new three-tier architecture that we envision and our goals regarding security and scalability. We do not want to compromise on our goals and ambitions for the next generation of the Thinkwise suite for the sake of keeping Indicium compatible with both the Universal GUI and our existing GUIs. At the same time, we also do not want to waste valuable development t

Moller TomaCaptain

published in News & Blogs

Community Badges - part one

You've got to catch them all! :rocket: Badges that can be earned in the subforum [i]Ideas.[/i] [img]https://uploads-eu-west-1.insided.com/thinkwise-en/attachment/de3691af-add6-4223-b2d5-2baf608956ee.png[/img] Badges that can be earned in the subforum [i]Installation.[/i] [img]https://uploads-eu-west-1.insided.com/thinkwise-en/attachment/59b386b7-bce0-40bf-a944-3637acef71eb.png[/img] Badges that can be earned in the subforum [i]Development.[/i] [img]https://uploads-eu-west-1.insided.com/thinkwise-en/attachment/96ee5360-ee02-462a-8289-e25949dc7a5a.png[/img]

Peter VerwijsModerator

published in News & Blogs

Test your unitsBlog

When developing software, a certain level of quality is expected in order for the final product to be accepted. Unit testing is an important part of the process to ensure that the software lives up to that standard of quality. Unit testing focuses on taking the smallest testable parts of software and matching the actual results of that unit against the expected results for a given input. With the 2019.1 release of the Software Factory we have taken steps to automate this process. Unit testing has always been possible, but up until now involved a manual process. Developers had to manually define the test, execute it and compare results. With unit testing in the Software Factory we’ve aimed to make this process efficient, reusable, and easy to implement in new and existing projects. [h3]Logic concepts[/h3]As mentioned in the intro, a unit is the smallest testable part of the software. The logic concepts in the Software Factory are an ideal candidate for this. They consist of smal

Jeroen van den BeltAdministrator

published in News & Blogs

Synchronization and deploymentBlog

In [url=https://community.thinkwisesoftware.com/blogs-21/roles-in-sf-considerations-and-possibilities-373]last week's blog post[/url] we described how we moved the roles from IAM to the Software Factory. Eventually the model, including its roles and rights, must end up in IAM. This blog post addresses that, parallel to moving the roles, synchronization to IAM has now also been moved to the Software Factory. Just like database creation, synchronizing is part of the deployment process, which also belongs in the Software Factory. For this purpose, two new screens have been added under the [i]Deployment[/i] menu group. [h2][b]Synchronization to IAM[/b][/h2] [img]https://uploads-eu-west-1.insided.com/thinkwise-en/attachment/9c1ab2b1-1eed-4f46-9ee6-2c88373380c7.png[/img] Just like in IAM, there are two options when synchronizing: directly to IAM, or by writing a file to disk. When executing these tasks, first a number of checks take place. For example, a check if the project versio

Jeroen van den BeltAdministrator

published in News & Blogs

Roles in SF - Considerations and possibilitiesBlog

Hello everyone! Lately I get asked a lot which project I am currently working on at our Product Innovation department. I tell them I am working on moving the roles out of our Intelligent Application Manager (IAM) into the Software Factory. Most of the times they nod slowly and say “Right!”. Let me begin by clarifying that by saying roles, I actually mean the configuration of roles and their corresponding model rights. However, you can imagine that some extra explanation is still required. Roles are already an important working part of IAM. Why would we want to move them to the Software Factory? It is mainly because of the importance of these roles that we have decided to move them. We consider them as an important part of the model, which is the domain of the developer. Since the model belongs in the Software Factory, why not also the corresponding role rights? In our opinion moving the roles to the Software Factory is the next logical step to take the concept of Role Based Access Cont

Anne BuitCommunity Manager

published in News & Blogs

(Re)design your rolesBlog

Thinkwise Platform version 2019.1 migrated the maintenance of roles from the Intelligent Application Manager to the Software Factory. This migration is in a way symbolic – The developers are fully responsible for creating and maintaining the roles within the application. Before role-based access control was introduced, rights would be granted directly to user groups. When upgrading an older version of the Thinkwise Platform (G9 or earlier), temporary roles would be automatically created based on the user groups to ensure nothing changed for end users. Not everyone replaced these temporary roles with proper roles. An [url=https://community.thinkwisesoftware.com/blogs-21/the-role-of-zombies-77]earlier blog[/url] was written around the time of the 2017.1 release, which introduced roles and presented global guidelines. Today, I’ll be providing more detailed guidelines for role administration within your application, even if it was built before roles were introduced. [h2][b]Wha

1
2
3
4
5
6

Page 4 / 6

Badges

martijngaasbeekhas earned the badge Preparator
SanderAdamhas earned the badge Preparator
Robert Wijn 2has earned the badge Adapter
Guido Bijlhas earned the badge Adapter
Dave Bieleveld Starcodehas earned the badge Critical Thinker

Show all badges

Powered by Gainsight

Terms & Conditions Cookie settings

Sign up

Already have an account? Login

Login

Login to the Thinkwise Software Community

Login

Enter your username or e-mail address. We'll send you an e-mail with instructions to reset your password.

Username or e-mail

Back to overview

Scanning file for viruses.

Sorry, we're still checking this file's contents to make sure it's safe to download. Please try again in a few minutes.

OK

This file cannot be downloaded

Sorry, our virus scanner detected that this file isn't safe to download.

OK