We know you’re busy.
In this day and age, everyone’s busy all the time. There’s lots of work to do, lots of problems to solve, and yet there’s so little time to do it all.
For Mendix 8.7, we’ve been busy, too. We’ve been building out some capabilities designed to give you a gift that everyone loves: Time. With new native mobile widgets, fixes to the warnings list, and a new copy/paste action in Studio (just to name a few), you now have the just a little more time back in your life to get back to what you’re good at: making.
Read on for more details, be wowed, and get your hands on Mendix 8.7. There’s no time to waste!
Native Carousel
A popular pattern in mobile is a carousel that shows content that you can explore by swiping. In this release, we added the Carousel widget combined with useful building blocks so that you can easily add this functionality to your apps. You can get quickly started and/or inspired by using one of the available building blocks which enables you to add carousel functionality to your native mobile app with a simple drag and drop. You are free to model the content of every slide in the carousel. It does not have to be just an image, but can be a combination of widgets. There is also an option for full-width and a card-like visualization.
To get this great widget for existing apps, update to the latest version of Native Mobile Resources or update the AtlasUI module. New apps based on the Native Mobile Quickstart starter app will have this widget automatically.
Fun fact: the Carousel Widget is based on another powerful new feature: repeatable containment for Pluggable Widgets, which we just so happen to talk about right below.
Repeatable containment for Pluggable Widgets
Do you still remember the buzz and excitement that was in the air when we introduced containment for pluggable widgets? We sure do.
Well, buckle your seat belts, because here comes repeatable containment which allows you to build widgets that can contain other widgets and have a datasource to load the (list of) data. For example, you can build your own variation of the list view, a carousel, or a special data view.
To accomplish this, you can now link the widgets property to the new datasource property. This allows you to select a list datasource and add widgets to the drop zone defined by the widgets property in the context of the data source.
Delighters
We know you love ‘em, so here is our latest batch of delighters.
Copy/paste pages and microflows in Studio
Have you ever built a great looking page in an app and then wanted to build something similar for a new app? You had to start from scratch! Imagine all that time wasted building out the amazing work you’ve already done.
With the latest Studio capability, you can get some of your time back. Now you can copy and paste pages, microflows, and enumerations between projects. Here’s how it works. Just select a page in the sidebar, open the context menu, and select ‘Copy to clipboard’. Then go the other project and paste (ctrl/cmd + V). We haven’t done the exact math, but we’re pretty sure this will save you enough time to get your favorite cappuccino and do a game of ping-pong with a colleague. Twice.
We’ve also added ‘Duplicate’ as a quick option to duplicate a page or microflow in Studio. This can be useful in many ways, for example when you’d like to build two alternatives of the same page and then decide which one to continue with.
Suppress warnings you don’t care about
Model warnings are useful because they indicate potential issues in your project that require attention from you as a developer. In some cases, you actually have to take action and make changes to the model to resolve the warning. In other cases, you make the conscious decision to ignore the warning, because, for example, maybe it’s a specific design choice you’ve made and there is not really an issue.
In the case of large projects, a list of warnings can get particularly long and the issues you need to address can get lost in the noise. The same can be said for warnings that sometimes come when you import modules from the App Store. You need to ignore these warnings because it’s best practice to keep App Store modules in tact. But the list just keeps getting noisier.
Cut through the warning noise with this Mendix 8.7 Studio Pro’s warning suppression capability.
You can now suppress a warning by its Error Code for:
- a specific document, e.g. a microflow, page, or domain model -or-
- a full module -or-
- the entire project.
Whenever you suppress a warning from the ‘Error’ pane, a suppression rule will be created. You can set up a warnings list that fits your project and you by adding new rules and editing or removing existing rules.
The suppression rules are local to your development environment. Share you personal settings with your team or across your apps by exporting & importing them. Want to make it more easily available for you team members? You can! Simply commit the exported file in your Team Server repository.
Finally, it is possible to completely ignore warnings from App Store content, so you don’t see any warnings from those modules anymore. Let the maintainers of App Store modules worry about the implementation details and internal quality of their modules. You just focus on making.
See how it works in the following GIF, check out the documentation or try it yourself in Studio Pro 8.7.
We would like to thank Jord ten Bulte & Jitze de Groot, Mart Busger op Vollenbroek, Jan de Lange, Gerard Veurink & Stefan Boeser, Diederik Wentink and Michal Mesaros for their input on the Mendix Idea Forum, and everyone else that commented on these idea topics or up-voted them Your input and feedback inspired us to implement this feature!
Configure an action on a text box
In Mendix Studio Pro, you can now configure an action when the user presses enter on a text box. For example, this can be very useful for password fields or search fields to let the user quickly perform their desired action.
Improved commit performance
We improved the performance of the commit action in Studio Pro for larger projects. In some cases, this can reduce the amount of time you have to wait by a minute. You’re too busy to wait this long for commits when you’re out there making. Now you can make with haste while avoiding the waste.
Advanced next action recommendations in microflow design by MxAssist
With this release, we have improved the Mendix Assist recommendation engine in Studio Pro by enabling more contextualized and advanced next-action recommendations. The engine can now better infer an intention on how a page is going to use a microflow and recommends the right action. Additionally, it can infer when to use a particular log message level. The recommendation engine can also accurately identify when a list activity is needed and recommends the right list. In a nutshell, these improvements help you easily build more advanced, higher-quality microflows faster than before.
Time to make!
To read more about these new capabilities and features, check out the release notes. And, as always, download the latest version of Mendix Studio Pro. Or just fire up Mendix Studio and start making.
In the interest of time, let’s end here. You’ve got some big problems to solve with some killer applications. Enjoy the time back.