In the past month, I've been asked to help other Mendix developers with what I'm seeing as a very common problem: Domain models. What is occurring is that the developers build their models, begin to create their pages and forms, and inevitably hit a wall where they can't quite get the attributes on their pages to align, associate, or a number of other issues. Worse yet are those applications that have been in production for a while that require a redesign in order to accommodate a new feature. In this post I'm going to explore how I troubleshoot and help correct designs.
Display line breaks in your Mendix strings
I was asked the following question recently:
Do you know if it is possible to use a new-line character when creating an attribute in Mendix? I've created an attribute that I would like to display as such:
Attribute Name
Entry 1
Entry 2
Entry 3
...
Where each Entry is generated via a loop. I've tried every new-line character combination and trick I know and can find on the internet ( '\n', '\\n', 'newline', hard coding the return, hard coding the return with a character in the first and last slot, hard coding spaces, etc.). All of the questions about this topic that I've run into on the Mendix forums have claimed that '\n' or '\\n' work but these do not work for me. I ran into one question on the forums (whichI can't seem to find now) where someone asked the exact question I have and also said that none of the answers he received worked.
The good news is that I can help. I, too, struggled with this topic early on in my Mendix development. I'm sure I read many of the same forum posts this individual did as well as I recognize the proposed solutions. Here's how I deal with line breaks in my Mendix strings.
Expand your Mendix app to other departments
This week I tackled a pretty common issue with all successful apps: Enable use across more than the one group it was developed. When an application solves a business problem, the users tend to tell their peers about it. Suddenly, those peers realize they have a similar business problem and they want in on the solution. In this blog, I'll discuss the various factors that need to be considered when transitioning a single-purpose app into a multi-purpose one.
Nested loops versus List Operations and effect on performance tuning
I was asked to help a fellow Mendix developer with some workflow issues and something stood out: There were a LOT of nested loops. Though preached (commanded?) by computer science professors as bad practice for very good reasons, we all know in the 'real world' outside of the walls of academia that sometimes you require the kind of result that can only be achieved by comparing multiple lists as they relate to each other. This creates a massive amount of overhead on a single-threaded application and can render an application useless if those lists are sizable. Sure, domain modeling is often to blame, but tools like what Mendix provides are supposed to make it easier for non-developers to do this kind of thing. There is a better way, and Mendix provides a set of actions to help you deal with these in a more efficient way: List Operations.
Beware! Don't 'Delete' your accounts!
Deleting application accounts should be performed only in specific instances. The most important instance, of course, is that you no longer care about that person's history of activity in your data. However, most data gets created with associations back to an account. The better option is almost always to 'deactivate' them. But that's easier said than done properly.