News & Blogs

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 logi

With the arrival of SQL Server 2016 Microsoft added the R Services add-on, which enables the execution of R scripts directly from T-SQL. Starting with SQL Server 2017, R Services was renamed to machine learning services to reflect the fact that Python is now supported as well. Both languages are highly popular in data science and machine learning. Python is an easy to learn general purpose language, while R was developed mainly for statisticians. Although there is a large amount of overlap between the languages, people with a background in statistics seem to prefer R over Python. On the other hand people new to programming or without a sufficient background in statistics prefer Python because of it's easy to learn syntax. Personally I think it is more a matter of choosing the right tool for the job. I would use Python for creating complex deep learning models and use R to analyze the results afterwards. In this blog I will show you that it is actually poss

With the upcoming 2017.1 release of the Thinkwise Suite, we have greatly increased the capabilities of process flows, including the addition of many frequently requested features. Stateful process flows and runtime configurable process actionsThe most frequently requested features for process flows relied on two distinct capabilities which, until now, had been absent from process flows. The first capability is to persist information produced by a process action throughout the entire process flow (stateful process flows). The second capability is to configure process actions at runtime to perform their corresponding action with a certain context (runtime configurable process actions). To illustrate the above, the Go to row process action, which is arguably the most requested feature, typically relies on both capabilities. A conceivable use case would be to have a process action that performs a task which inserts a record

When we were young we all wanted to be a superhero, now it's our chance to become one! We believe that every member of the Thinkwise Community has the potential to become a superhero who saves the day. If you're a new member of the community, you're still a rookie, but that's no problem, right? It's your time to show the world your skills, and when you do, you choose the path of greatness and start your journey from apprentice to superhero. Superheroes are not afraid to ask questions or enter into discussions and to become a sidekick of a superhero, you also need to develop this skill. Your proactive attitude is appreciated within the community, make sure you give this appreciation to others as well, but remember a vanguard is a group of people leading the way in new developments or ideas, so make sure you do that, because that's your opportunity to become a warrior. A warrior never shy away from a challenge and beats ev

This product roadmap provides an overview of the planned developments for the Thinkwise Platform in 2019. It highlights the main themes we are committed to and describes several projects related to these themes.The input from the Thinkwise community has been essential for the creation of this roadmap. Submitting your ideas and voting on ideas in the new Thinkwise Community will play an important role here, to gather and determine the value of new ideas. In addition, we closely monitor developments in the market, provide technology updates, conduct research into new technologies and innovations, and validate the roadmap with customers, Forrester and Gartner.This roadmap is not a comprehensive list of all new features but is intended to provide some visibility into our key investments. The mentioned feature sets and timeframes are current at the time of writing and subject to change. ThemesIn the past year, we have taken a slightly differe

For as long as I can remember people have been expressing their wish for this new feature. If they could somehow quickly gauge whether or not they should open a tab page somewhere in their application to see if there’s data in there… wouldn’t that be great? With the increasing adoption of smartphones and mobile apps for businesses this need is becoming more manifest. This is why I’m excited to announce that such a feature is now an integral part of the Software Factory, as of version Pyxis – G9.8. Welcome to Badges! There’s this paradoxical thing about badges to me. They seem like such a small addition, but after I learned to identify them, they suddenly popped up everywhere, like little pixies:

For a long time we have offered features outside of our standard range as extenders; small files containing custom code that configure a range of properties which allow the use of an otherwise unavailable feature, such as the maps component or the resource scheduler. This was a great way to integrate new (and sometimes experimental) components, but it also introduced a lot of overhead and decreased maintainability of the GUI. Every little change to the extender meant changing the code, compiling it into a dll, and deploying it. Furthermore, changes to our codebase that impacted a certain extender meant going through the extenders for every customer and checking for errors. To address these issues we decided to create a way to model the extenders in the Software Factory. While it's still not a full integration of these features into the Software Factory it creates an easily accessible and maintainable way to implement the current set of extenders into your products. It al

With the upcoming release of 2019.1, we are discontinuing support for generating Java and C# service tiers. The Windows GUI will no longer be able to use these service tiers as a back-end. This blog describes the reasoning behind this and the (better) alternatives that are available. It is important to note that the generated SOAP service tiers have done a great job in advancing the Thinkwise Platform. At the time when these service tiers were released, they were state-of-the-art and solved some important challenges. Many applications have used these service tiers in production environments. But like any technology, it must eventually yield to a successor. The true power of the Thinkwise Platform lies in the fact that a technology switch like this can actually be made. Why get rid of them?The main reason to use the generated Java and C# service tiers was to support Mobile. Mobile GUI’s cannot directly connect to the database and needed the service

The Thinkwise Platform ensures that our customers do not have to worry about technological obsolescence of their applications. By separating model and technology, combined with our advanced runtime interpretation technology, we are able to update or replace technologies with minimal impact on existing applications. In order to adopt new technologies, however, it is sometimes necessary to drop support for older technologies.Such a moment has come with the upcoming release of version 2018.3 of the Thinkwise Platform. With this release, we stop supporting SQL Server version 2008R2 and lower, and require the .NET Framework 4.7 for the user interfaces and the Indicium application tier. By requiring SQL Server 2012 or higher we can use all kinds of cool “new” features regarding storage, SQL, performance, security, and

SQL Server 2012In case you missed part 1 of the new features. Window function framesThis feature is a really cool enhancement to window functions which fills a niche gap for queries of a cumulative nature. A window function can be applied on a limited set in regards to the partitioning, the ordering and the current row. Other language featuresThe parse function has also been added which can be used to parse data using culture-specific settings. The try

While SQL Server 2008r2 is currently the minimum version for SF and IAM, products created using the SF can use any version (up to 2017 at the time of writing). In this blog, I’d like to share some of the introduced language features in versions 2012 up to 2017 and explain how you can use them in your products. This blog focuses only on Transact-SQL syntax features you can use in your own application logic. Features such as new database management functions, new data types, new types of database objects or optimization features will be saved for another time. SQL Server 2012Eventually we will set the minimal version of SQL Server to SQL Server 2012. This provides us with the opportunity to use language features introduced in SQL Server 2012 in the Software Factory, the Intelligent Application Manager and in Indicium and the GUI’s when accessing the databases. The following features are discussed:

Previously, you always had to have a form component on your screen to be able to add new rows. This is no longer necessary, because the grid now also supports adding new rows. This feature is released with version 2018.2 of the Thinkwise Platform (Windows GUI only). What’s new?When adding new rows is enabled for a grid, an empty ‘add row’ is displayed at the top of the grid. Be aware that only the values of columns that are visible in the grid can be filled in. The ‘add row’ is positioned directly under the grid column header, so it is clear which input field belongs to which column. It is also possible to only show the ‘add row’ while adding or copying. This can be configured in the Software Factory.

The icons you use in your applications for tables, prefilters, tasks and reports often show up in multiple locations in the application, like the menu, tab pages, the ribbon, button bars and the context menu. These locations require different icon sizes, and the user interfaces would scale the supported Bitmap (.bmp) or Portable Network Graphics (.png) icons to the required size. This, however, causes the icons to become blurred. With the latest release of the users interfaces we’ve added support for two new image formats to solve this problem. Scalable Vector GraphicsScalable Vector Graphics (.svg) are images based on vectors instead of pixels, allowing them to be scaled to any size without getting blurry. Another advantage of SVGs is that, because SVGs are XML-based, it is easy to adjust the properties of the ima

With the introduction of Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation, it is more important than ever for companies that their IT environment is secure and meets the legal requirements for privacy protection. To help our customers comply with this new legislation, we added a new feature “Data sensitivity” to the Thinkwise Platform to automate the anonymization of personal data in any Thinkwise application. This feature can not only be used for personal data, but also for other sensitive data like passwords or credit card numbers. With this new feature, we enable you to set the sensitivity for each data column of your application in the “Data sensitivity” modeler. View-columns, calculated fields, and identity fields are not data columns and therefore are not shown. A prefilter is provided to suggest which columns are sensitive, based on keywords or because columns with the same name or domain are also marked sensitive.

Starting from version 2018.2, the Mobile GUI is equipped with one of the most requested features: barcode scanning. This cool new feature allows you to fill in fields by scanning a barcode or QR code with the camera of your mobile device! How does it work?To enable this feature, set the Control of the field you want to fill to “Barcode scanner (mobile)”.  The field can have any datatype, but will be displayed as a text field with a scan button in it.  

The previous article showed an overview of the Next Generation Thinkwise Platform. In this article, we’ll zoom in a bit more on the Indicium Application Tier and explain our vision for Indicium’s architecture and its key features and properties. ArchitectureTwo of the core concepts of Indicium’s architecture are extensibility and modularity. It is our goal to make it easy to extend Indicium by plugging in custom components that adhere to predefined interfaces. At the same time, we also want to make many of Indicium’s standard components modular. This makes both adding custom components and omitting standard components easy, allowing you to create a tailored version of Indicium that meets all your requirements without having any unnecessary features. Another goal of Indicium’s architecture is

Technological innovations follow each other at an ever-faster pace, and the challenge to keep up with this digital transformation is increasing. It is set in motion by the rise of the 3rd Platform; the inter-dependency between social, mobile, cloud and analytics. The 3rd Platform architecture is transforming IT much faster than the first (mainframe) and second (client/server) platforms ever did, changing the way people interact with technology and disrupting existing business models across industries.   Digital Transformation and the 3rd platform To help our customers keep up with this digital transformation and main

During development of a project, often many project versions are created to facilitate for data-model changes. After development is complete and the production database needs to be upgraded, it is desirable to create a single script to upgrade the current production version to the final project version. This requires that the data conversion definition for all intermediate project versions is merged, or squashed, into a single data conversion from the first to the final version. How does it workLet’s see how it works with an example. We start out with the table customer in version 3.80. This table is renamed to clients in version 3.90, for which we create a data conversion record.

In the 2018.1 release of the Thinkwise Suite we have followed up on 2017.1’s major modernization of process flows, and have introduced some more cool features. Deep linkingAs of version 2018.1, our Web GUI supports deep links. A deep link is a link which doesn’t just point to the location of an application, but also a location within that application. For instance, a deep link could direct a user to a certain subject, a certain record within that subject, and perhaps start a task or report for that record. At this point you might be wondering what deep linking and process flows have in common. Well, we wanted our capabilities for deep linking to be rich, without making the links themselves long and complicated. We concluded that the features we wanted to be ‘deep linkable’ were exactly the same features as those offered by process flows. Because of this, our implementation of deep linking is simply being able to trigger a process flow through a li

Review required In the Software Factory 2018.1 release, a new ‘Review required’ setting has been added to the SF configuration. This setting is turned on as default in the installation or upgrade of the Software Factory. Review required setting Ready for review With review required turned on, the task to complete a control procedure will be replaced by a task to set a control procedure ready for review.

A while ago, a blog was published about retrieving identity values in T-SQL using the Output-clause. This blog continues on this subject for a more advanced scenario. The caseThere are some situations where you don’t just want the identities as output, but you also want to match them to related records which were used in the insert statement. For instance, when copying multiple order records including the order_line records, you need to match the new order_id with the source order_id in order to copy the order_line records properly. Now don’t get me wrong, there are other ways to achieve our goal of mapping the inserted order_id identity with the source order_id: We could store a foreign key called source_order_id in the

Creating a tree view for subjects has always been a struggle, until now. All that is needed in release 2017.1 is setting up the tree model for your subject and assigning a screen type with a TreeView component. Tree propertiesJust like the grid and form the tree is now fully configurable through the Subject modeler. The tree display column is the text column shown in the tree. When leaving it blank the look-up display column will be used. The icon column presents the icon in front of the display column. There are two tree types to choose from: hierarchical and column grouping. These will be explained later on. A new feature is the default expanded property. When set, the tree will automatically expand to the provided level of nodes.

In 2016 we’ve started to improve the layout of the Project Portal (which has since been dubbed ‘Thinkwise Insights’). Some of the changes were already possible with layouts in the G9.8 SF. We’ve made full use of those possibilities and we’ve added a lot more options to the SF. One of the most noticeable changes is that we’ve renamed layouts to themes, so from now on I’ll be talking about themes. If you’re still on a version of the SF that uses layouts, you can substitute layout. Our goal was to make it easier to create a modern, fresh and usable look and feel for your application. In this article I’ll tell you what options you have and how to best utilize them to create a usable, clean, modern and awesome-looking application. Grid Alternating rowsYou’ve never had the option to change the color of the alternating rows in the grid. The GUIs calculated a color for you, and that was it. You could remove the alternating b

Every morning when you get up, you make your bed. When you grab your toothbrush, you put toothpaste on it. When you’ve washed your face, you wipe it dry. After you’ve had breakfast, you tidy up the table. Life would be so much easier if these morning rituals could be done automatically. Well, we can’t help you with that, but what we can do is make your job life easier with user preferences. In fact, we can make it very easy by setting these preferences automatically for you, when you generate and apply recommendations. User preferences allow actions to be done automatically, such as opening a screen when you start an application, filtering for specific data by creating prefilters, and more. For many of those preferences it is possible to generate recommendations in Intelligent Application Manager (IAM) based on your work behavior. RecommendationsRecommendations are simply user preference suggestions in IAM based on the user logs. Use

One of our most fervent bug-reporters mentioned that it’s truly annoying to get a pop-up in SQL Server Management Studio most of the times you open a new template. Developers see this pop-up because the file contents are updated. This happens when the file is no longer monitored by the Software Factory. A line is added to notify the developer that the file is disconnected. SQL Server Management Studio detects this change in the file and provides you with the pop-up as seen below. And it’s true, this disturbs the workflow. Some developers even gave up on opening templates directly from the Software Factory and instead resorted to copy-pasting templates. The