The end of August is here and it’s time for a Mendix update. If you’re new to application development, sometimes having someone around to give you a pep talk when you get frustrated is comforting and reassuring. No one should ever have to low-code in anger, and it’s one of the many reasons why we created Mendix Assist. If you’re a citizen developer, Mendix Assist will help to teach, advise, and assist you with building sound logic for applications. With performance updates, error checking, and a number of delighters to ease your low-coding life, Mendix 7.18 has something for everyone to make app creation easier.
Web Modeler Updates
Mendix Assist – AI-assisted development
The Microflow editor in the Web Modeler now features Mendix Assist. Based upon Machine Learning analysis of over five million anonymized application flows built with Mendix across 15 industries, Mendix Assist provides 90 percent accuracy on next-step suggestions in microflows.
So, what does this mean? Looking at the previous activities and the context of the microflow, Mendix Assist suggests the most sensible activities you can take next. These activities are fully configured using available variables, attributes and best practices.
Mendix Assist helps with app development in 3 ways:
- Teach – Mendix Assist helps mentor new developers with guided recommendations to accelerate modeling proficiency.
- Advise – Mendix Assist partners with a virtual pair programmer to gain efficiency and learn best practices.
- Assist – Mendix Assist speeds up development and prevents defects before they happen, reducing time and cost impact by 100x.
Desktop Modeler Updates
Instant consistency checks
Earlier this year we introduced Instant deployment, which speeds up local deployment massively. In 7.18 we’ve added Instant checks. From now on only the relevant consistency checks are validated when changing the application model. This is especially useful for larger apps, showing at least a 10 times faster check speed, going from three seconds to instantly ready.
Align microflow activities
The microflow editor now offers the ability to horizontally or vertically align selected actions. This should help you keep your microflows readable.
Postpone commit for any import mapping
You can now avoid committing objects directly when importing XML or JSON. This enables you to validate or enrich your imported data before committing the objects to the database.
Group Java action parameters in categories
You can now group the parameters of java actions in categories. This gives a better overview and description of the input parameters of java action calls, especially when there are many parameters.
REST Publish
CORS, Cross-Origin Resource Sharing, is a standard mechanism to specify which domains are allowed to use REST APIs. This is used when web applications or mobile applications want to use REST APIs from another service. You can now use CORS on your REST APIs to determine which web apps and mobile apps can use the REST API.
Dynamic Labels for Input Widgets (Delighter)
We added functionality that makes your labels for input widgets much more dynamic. This will allow you to create a more dynamic and user-friendly UI and reduces the need for the Text widgets, making development faster.
Thank you for the feedback, Fabian!
Platform Portal Updates (Delighters)
It was already possible to search through the platform-wide Buzz social feed, but search in a specific app project was missing. Now you can search through the Buzz of a specific app project directly.
Ready…Set…Build!
That’s all for now. Load up the Web Modeler and try out Mendix Assist. We’d love to know what you think. As always, feel free to continue the conversation on the Mendix Community website, and follow us @Mendix and @MendixDeveloper on Twitter. To learn all the fine details of the 7.18 release, head over to the release notes and download the modeler. See you soon!
