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All of you, that have worked with Microsoft Azure, have probably noticed that Azure does not allow you to mutate or select data from a different database than the transaction database. However often you find yourself in a situation where this is necessary. This blog will help you with exactly that. This blog describes 2 features which you can use. Feature 1 External Datasource Microsoft SQL has a feature available called “External Datasource”. This feature supports selecting data from an external source, but does not require to connect to this external source. It is kind of like a fake table within your database, which selects data from the defined external source. While using an External Datasource it is possible to select data from another database within Azure. Do keep in mind that it is not (yet) possible to mutate data using an External Datasource. If you would like to mutate data on a different database, you have to use the second option this blog will describe. How to configure

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 environment

Would you like to know more? Read the release notes here!

Data security and privacy remain important aspects of everyday life and in the Thinkwise Platform. Therefore, as of release 2021.1, we created a new access type: 'unauthorized', which can be used for columns, tasks and reports. And on top of that: you don't need to set up the columns yourself, but the Software Factory does it for you! Hidden or unauthorized? Now before explaining how that's possible, let's first set out the difference between a hidden and an unauthorized column. A hidden column was already available in the Software Factory. It means that the column is hidden visually from the user interface. That's quite safe already, but in some cases the data might still be approached through Indicium. Unauthorized columns on the other hand can't be approached in any way. The user interface or any API won't even know the column exists, so that's an even safer way to protect your sensitive data. Until now, the best way to get the same effect was excluding columns from a basic table in

Document previewing has been an important feature in our Windows and Web GUIs over the last years. By popular demand, we have implemented an API for document previewing in Indicium as well. Because of this, our Universal GUI now supports document preview as well, but as with every feature that you see in our Universal GUI, you can also integrate it in your own applications very easily because it's an API offered by Indicium. What does this API offer? Document Preview allows users to preview files that are stored in your application. Indicium makes this work by converting the files, if required, to a data format that is supported by browsers. The following data formats are currently supported by Indicium: Word Excel PowerPoint E-mail PDF Images Webpages Indicium will convert Excel files, e-mail, images and webpages into HTML format and everything else into PDF format. How to use? To use Document Preview, the only thing needed is a table in which the files are stored. If a file column is

Want to get a quick, but thorough introduction of all the innovative features of the Thinkwise Platform? Watch our brand-new platform video and discover the power of low-code for core systems!

As Microsoft has announced, basic authentication for the Exchange Web Services will be deprecated from October 13th, 2020. Basic authentication will be replaced by OAuth 2.0. OAuth 2.0 is a more secure and reliable way than Basic Authentication to access data from the Exchange service. These changes only apply to the cloud-based Exchange service, there are no changes for on-premises Exchange servers. Do you use the Thinkwise Exchange Connector with Exchange Online or Office 365? Then make sure you upgrade to the latest version of the Thinkwise Exchange Connector before October 13. To setup or configure the new authentication for your Thinkwise Exchange Connector, download the latest version from TCP and follow the instruction manual on Thinkwise Docs. If you have any questions about setting up the new authentication, please let us know.

Thinkwise Platform Pentest It is important to us as Thinkwise that our customers have a secure Low Code software platform. That is why we periodically do a pentest to prove that the Thinkwise Low Code platform is sufficiently safe. The pentest was augmented with several audit activities, in which security controls, secure configuration and secure development were discussed in interview form. The following topics were covered in this audit: Secure design and architecture (both network and application-level) Secure software development (SAST, DAST, threat modelling etc.) IT Security Controls: authorization, authentication, password management IT Security Controls: secure communication and encryption; data protection at rest IT Security Controls: access control / default deny Description of test scope Because the attack surface of applications built using the Thinkwise low code platform is defined by the components available at runtime, the pentest was performed using an example applicati

One of the unique and distinguishing features of the Thinkwise Platform is that applications developed with the platform can survive technologies. Thinkwise applications can seamlessly switch over to new technologies, platforms, and even completely new software architectures, without any rework. Customers who developed their core system with the Thinkwise platform 16 years ago, at the time with a Visual Basic user interface in a two-tier architecture, have over time been able to effortlessly upgrade their existing enterprise systems to new technologies such as Web and Mobile, migrate to the cloud if desired, and take advantage of advanced new features like Machine Learning. And soon, all Thinkwise application will be able to switch to the latest Thinkwise Universal User Interface, a Progressive Web App developed with React that will replace all the other Thinkwise user interfaces. Evolution of Thinkwise Platform technologies Don't just rebuild We are becoming increasingly adept at deve

A popular request, the Mass Update feature, has been implemented in the latest release of the Web user interface. You might already be familiar with the Mass Update feature in the Windows interface, found in the Extra section of the ribbon which allows you to update values of one or more columns in multiple rows of a table at once. This feature is now also available in the Web interface. Update in the Ribbon’s Extra section The setting for enabling or disabling permissions to Mass Update in the Software Factory remains the same and is found in the Subjects screen where it is enabled by default, as shown below. In the Software Factory : Subjects > Permissions > Other > Mass Update This checkbox can be toggled on or off to enable or disable the Mass Update button respectively. Remember to synchronize to IAM and the changes will then be reflected in your end application interface on Web. The result of unchecking the Mass Update setting, as is the case in the Windows interface, is that the

We are happy to announce a new component has been released for the Windows and Web GUI’s which enables end users to preview various documents like PDF’s, Word documents, Excel sheets, Powerpoint slides, images, web pages and many more from within the GUI. The preview component just needs a path to any file or URL you’d like to open. The Windows GUI preview component uses the same preview technique as Windows Explorer. It uses the registered previewer if one is available. The Web GUI loads the file on the server and generates images which are sent to the client. The preview component supports 50+ file formats, including PDF and Microsoft Office documents. Usage To use this new component you can easily use the screen type modeller in the Software Factory. Simply drag the preview component on your favourite screen type like you’re used to and watch the magic happen! The preview component uses the first column in your table that contains a URL or file path and will try to preview it for yo

A small, but very useful improvement has been delivered in the latest release of the Windows and Web user interfaces and the Indicium Service tier. It is now possible to use process flow variables in the constant value of input parameters of process flow actions! To create the request URL for an HTTP connector based on user input, for example, instead of having to create the URL in the process action logic like this: set @url = 'https://api.overheid.io/bag?filters[postcode]=' + @postcode You can just set the value of the URL parameter like this: The user interfaces and service tier will automatically substitute {postcode} with the current value of the postcode process flow variable when the HTTP action is executed. Be careful when using this feature in the SQL parameter of a Database connector, as this increases the risk of SQL injection. When using the Database connector process action, we strongly advice to use ODBC question mark placeholders with the JSON or plain text Parameters in

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 compon

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 database. Thi

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 time c

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 finish The 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 locked while

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. The r

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 (instance).

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

Why do zombies breathe? If we want to categorize zombies into one of the following groups: humans, animals, plants or materials, the closest we’d get would be humans. This group includes the basic abilities for humans, such as the most important one: breathing. Categorizing zombies as humans means zombies will own the same basic abilities as humans. Now I don’t know if I am crazy, but why would a zombie need oxygen? As is known, zombies can stay under water for an unlimited amount of time, given that they do not dissolve, and when its head is separated from its body, including lungs, the head will stay alive as long as the brain isn’t damaged. This means the basic breathing ability is useless. Besides the useless ability, zombies can infect other living beings. If we add this ability, it would mean that humans can infect others. To make a difference between humans and zombies, a new group should be created for zombies, which will be similar to the humans group. By creating a group simi

We use the Thinkwise Platform to build massive administrative systems that support companies in their core processes. Not all of these companies have the required expertise when it comes to the management and maintenance of hosting a database and web server. This makes sense, every man to his trade. Yet many companies deploy their software on-premise. In this blog, we explore various facets of a different approaches on deploying applications on Azure. Managing applications on Azure is relatively easy, as there is no need to worry about the underlying infrastructure or services. Both database and web servers are easily scalable and exposing the application world-wide is relatively easy. Depending on the scenario, deploying the application on Azure is cheaper than on-premise. To be clear, we are not talking about Azure Virtual Machines in this blog. Azure VM is an IaaS solution, not much different from hosting at a datacenter. While it does remove the need to worry about the infrastructu

Google Play and the Apple App Store require a number of screenshots for an app before it is admitted to the store. For iOS, these screenshots must exactly match the specified dimensions. But creating a 2732 x 2048 screenshot on a 1920 x 1080 monitor can be quite a challenge. This posts describes an easy way to create those screenshots using the Chrome DevTools. Step 1 Open the Thinkwise Viewer in debug mode using the included debug.bat file. This will show the Chrome DevTools inside the viewer. Step 2 Click the device toolbar icon at the top to show the Device Toolbar: Step 3 Select the appropriate device from the device toolbar. Optionally change the orientation using the rotate icon. Don’t worry if the image is zoomed or if it’s too large for your display. If the device is not available you can add an emulated or custom device using the Edit option. Step 4 Create a screenshot using the option Capture full size screenshot and select the location where to save the file. Step 5 File a r

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)