News & Blogs

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 confi

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 denyDescription of test scopeBecause the attack surface of applications built using the Thinkwise low co

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.

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 sectionThe 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. 

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 co

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]=' + @postcodeYou 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. 

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 t

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.  

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-cont

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 notif

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 righ

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 setti

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 h

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.

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

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:

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)

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' Cl

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 HR, Purchasing or Production. Alternatively, they can be smaller modules with only a few tasks such as Promotions. Modules can also be add-ons to existing modules such as Purchasing analytics. There are no constraints imposed by the Software Factory when it comes to the size of a module or dependencies between modules. What defines a module? 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: Developers would have to tag the modu

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 labelAdju

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. ForecastingForecasting 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