I implemented the 'Dropzone' widget found on the public Mendix App Store into one of my applications this week and found the documentation rather light. Since it took me a few iterations to figure out how best to implement it, I thought I’d share what I learned and hopefully save some of you out there looking to implement it some effort.
Reporting with Mendix Document Templates - Alternative to the 'Report Pane'
There will come a point during your project where the users will start to ask about getting information back out of this new, slick Mendix application that they are all putting data into. As a BI professional, I’m not talking about OLAP models and prediction modeling. OLTP (On-Line Transactional Processing) applications like the ones you build with Mendix are all about data capture and workflow transformation. But every mature application offers its users some ability to report on the information within it. I’m going to describe one method I use for building these reports in this post, so if that interests you read on!
How can code execute correctly sometimes, and incorrectly others?
This past week I encountered a problem that I was at my wits end to solve. The problems was this: Randomly, a process wouldn't work. The same code was getting executed by the press of a button, but sometimes it just wouldn't work. Was something wrong with the engine in the Cloud since it always worked in local testing? After a brief discussion with a few members of Mendix’s own Success Team, we were able to find the root cause and redesign to care for the issue. Read on and hopefully I'll save you from some similar headaches.
Taking a critical eye to those ‘old’ Microflows
This entry started as the first in my next series that I planned about reporting with Mendix, but when capturing my screenshots I realized my example was so poorly designed in a working, production application that I needed to address it. While I don’t have the story prioritized to actually do the work to fix it versus competing higher priority issues, I’m going to explain what I did wrong in one of the first processes I ever wrote in Mendix and how I would design it differently had I followed my BI best practices and understood Mendix as well as I do now. Hopefully this comparison will help others who develop in Mendix when trying to optimize their application and look at each step more critically.