Studio Pro

History Pane Beta: Non-blocking and searchable!

We’re happy to announce the public beta of our new History Pane, which you can enable in the New Features preferences. Once activated, it will seamlessly replace the existing History pop-up.

This non-blocking pane allows you to maintain context, browsing history while simultaneously opening changed documents. A lightning-fast search has also been integrated, enabling you to quickly sift through commit messages, authors, and revision hashes. Furthermore, we’re now showing ‘remote revisions,’ which display work pushed to the server by your peers even before it’s downloaded to your local machine, significantly simplifying how you stay up to date with server-side developments.

Over the coming months, we’ll focus on achieving General Availability status. We also plan to introduce a date filter and convenient context menu options, such as quickly creating a branch. Looking further ahead, our roadmap includes historical diffing, enabling you to visualize actual document changes, like modifications to microflow activities or domain model entities.

Larger dialogs

We’ve increased the size of dialogs that include expressions, so that it’s easier to read and fill out larger expressions. This should make working with more complex apps easier. Additionally, when resizing a dialog, we also remember the size of the dialogs, making it easier to re-open and edit the information within.

Custom document types in extensibility

It is now possible to create a custom document type using the web extensibility framework. This allows extension developers to store data in a custom definition, which can be reused later for other extension use cases, such as integration definitions, specific mappings or other data you may want to keep.

Batch convert Dojo widgets to React

Modernizing your Mendix app for React compatibility just got easier for several common widgets. Instead of manually converting every Data grid, Image widget, and Selector one by one, you can now batch convert multiple Dojo widgets to their React counterparts in a single operation. The new batch conversion dialog lets you select specific modules for migration and automatically converts all instances of Data Grid, Dynamic Image, Static Image, Drop Down, Reference Selector, Reference Set Selector, and Input Reference Set Selector widgets that can be safely updated without losing configurations. While you’ll still need to handle other widgets manually, this eliminates the repetitive conversion work for these frequently used components.

Generate overview pages using templates

Overview page generation from entities has always been a quick way to create administration interfaces, automatically generating pages with data grids and forms for any entity. However, these generated pages followed a standard design that may not match your application’s look and feel. Now you can select a custom template, ensuring your overview pages and forms align with your design system from the start. This eliminates the tedious work of manually styling each generated administration page to match your brand, helping you maintain visual consistency across your entire application while keeping the speed of automated page generation.

Data widgets – Select all across all pages

Data Grid 2 now supports true select all functionality that works across your entire dataset, not just the current page. When you use the top left checkbox to select all rows on a Data grid 2 page, it first selects all items on the current page as before, but now displays a banner offering to select all items across all pages, perfect for performing batch actions on large, filtered datasets. You can pass these selections directly to any nanoflow or microflow to execute your bulk operations, making it much easier to manage large amounts of data efficiently. With this, we bring you one of the most requested features from the idea forum.

Strengthening session security with Absolute Session Timeout

In today’s digital landscape, maintaining secure user sessions is critical. Mendix has long supported this with a default session timeout of 10 minutes of inactivity. However, this approach alone may not be sufficient for organizations with stringent security requirements.

The challenge arises when users remain continuously active. In such cases, sessions can persist indefinitely, potentially increasing the risk of unauthorized access if a session is hijacked or left unattended. For organizations operating in regulated industries or handling confidential information, this poses a significant security concern.

To address this, we are introducing the AbsoluteSessionTimeout runtime configuration setting. This new feature allows developers to define a maximum lifespan for any session, regardless of user activity. Once the specified time limit is reached, the session will expire automatically, ensuring that no session can remain active beyond the defined threshold.

This enhancement does not alter the existing inactivity timeout but adds an upper boundary to session duration. It provides organizations with greater flexibility and control over session management, aligning with best practices for secure application deployment. For implementation details, refer to the documentation.

Dynamic Case Management add-on (private beta)

Dynamic Case Management is a case management add-on to Mendix by CaseFabric. For those unfamiliar with Case Management:

Case Management focuses on automation of processes where each process instance is a unique situation requiring real-time automation of interactions among humans, systems and agents, based on process context. It supports scenarios where processes are unstructured or semi-structured and where exception is the norm.

With this new add-on you will have the option to design case models right from Studio Pro. The DCM add-on module deeply integrates with Mendix Studio Pro’s Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) to provide a holistic approach to case management. It leverages Mendix pages for defining HumanTasks (UI modeling), Mendix microflows for Process Tasks (logic modeling), and the Mendix Domain Model to define the case file structure using your application’s Entities (Data modeling). This integration ensures consistent and manageable case data while allowing dynamic interaction within the familiar Mendix environment.

In addition to the add-on module itself, we also introduced the Dynamic Case Management Commons module. This a specific module that has preconfigured page templates, pages, overviews, etc. which saves you time during the development phase and is directly available to download from the Mendix Marketplace.

External Database Connector

For those working with extensive databases containing thousands of tables, views, and stored procedures, you’ll now experience much faster schema retrieval. Our connector now efficiently fetches catalog information, dramatically speeding up the display of your database’s object tree. Plus, to make your workflow even smoother, you can now simply drag and drop table and view names directly from this overview into the SQL editor, accelerating your query writing.

Event Broker

You can now easily update your existing bridges with new event types without needing to recreate them. This means you can add new event types on the fly, ensuring your critical applications stay online and your data keeps flowing without any interruptions. For instance, customers using the HTTP bridge to collect IoT events from the shop floor can now seamlessly integrate new sensor data types whenever needed, all without a moment of downtime. It’s all about keeping your operations agile and efficient!

Consumed REST Service: OpenAPI v3.1.0 contracts, non-blocking warnings, and improved parameters

We’re releasing some enhancements to how you work with Consumed REST Services. First up, the OpenAPI functionality gets an upgrade. You can now import OpenAPI contracts up to version 3.1.0, so you can work with contracts that adhere to the latest specs. Plus, we’ve introduced non-blocking warnings for contracts containing semantic or structural errors. This means you can now import and work with contracts even if they have minor issues, allowing you to leverage usable parts of the contract immediately.

We’ve also made one small tweak in how we handle parameters and query parameters. Now you can include special characters in these fields. This simple addition will unlock new possibilities for more advanced integration scenarios, like defining deepObject-style query parameters and calling OData queries with REST.

Consumed OData Service: external actions with optional parameters

For those leveraging Consumed OData Services, you can now invoke External Actions that include optional parameters. Studio Pro will respect the parameter optionality annotation within your OData service metadata. Optional parameters of an external action will not produce consistency errors when left empty. This means that your consumed OData implementation will better reflect the intention of the contract, allowing for more consistent integration.

Marketplace: Improved component upload flow and security

The Mendix Marketplace component upload flow now features a new design and a clearer structure, helping contributors publish components with confidence. The process is organized into four steps, guiding contributors through all required information and allowing them to preview the listing before publishing.

Contributors can now:

• Preview the listing before publication.
• Assign multiple developers as owners of a component.
• Add multiple resource links and documentation materials to support users effectively.

The four steps are:

1. Uploading the component – Upload a source file or link to a GitHub repository and provide basic information. When adding a new component, starting at version 1.0.0 is no longer mandatory.
2. Providing general information – Add a detailed description and a short tagline that will appear on the marketplace card.
3. Defining license and support – Choose a license type, add support contact details or a website, and assign multiple developers to the listing.
4. Adding media and documentation – Upload up to 10 screenshots, one video, documentation, and up to five links to supporting resources.

Before publishing, contributors can review the component in preview mode to verify that all information and visuals are correct.

All components submitted to the public marketplace are automatically scanned for vulnerabilities using QSM. Components that pass the scan are approved and published automatically. If issues are detected, a manual review will be completed within five days.

This update strengthens both the contributor process and marketplace reliability, supporting a trusted and secure environment for everyone sharing and using components.

A frequently requested improvement from the idea forum is now live. When a component you’re subscribed to is updated, the release notes are included directly in the notification email. This makes it easier to stay informed about what has changed without needing to visit the Marketplace page.

Capital connector

Siemens Capital is a suite of electrical and electronics (E/E) software tools to design and develop electrical and electronic systems, including system architecture, communication networks, and embedded software. The Mendix Capital connector is a module consisting of microflows that integrate with REST APIs of Capital to authenticate, effortlessly get Capital data into your Mendix app, and build custom implementations tailored to your needs.

As part of the adapt and extend initiative, the Mendix Industry team has a strategic plan to integrate four Xcelerator Product Portfolio elements namely Teamcenter, Opcenter, Capital and Polarion. After Teamcenter and Opcenter, Capital is the next in line for which we have developed the first building block in the form of a connector. Capital falls into the engineering domain focusing on networking, electrical design, wire harness design mostly for the aerospace and defense, automotive and transportation, and heavy equipment verticals.

With the Capital connector, the customers of Capital can now:

• Effortlessly get the data from Capital into Mendix domain model
• Develop persona specific applications integrating Capital design data with other third-party systems like PLM, ERP and MES
• Extend the reach of Capital data to non-core users of Capital without having to login to Capital and comprehend the complex usage of the tool

Smart Apps

Altair RapidMiner showcase app: Learn how to integrate machine learning predictions into Mendix

Altair RapidMiner lets organizations create machine learning models using Altair RapidMiner AI Studio and deploy them through AI Hub, enabling smooth integration with your Mendix applications. Check out the new Altair RapidMiner Showcase App to learn how to integrate machine learning predictions into a Mendix app using REST services. This showcase example focuses on employee attrition predictions, showing how to consume AI Hub endpoints to make data-driven HR decisions within your Mendix apps. No extensive knowledge of data science or machine learning is required to follow this example. Altair RapidMiner and this how-to will teach you all you need to know to get started.

Are you ready to start your next app?

• Download Mendix Studio Pro
• Take a closer look at all the features, improvements, fixes, and more in the Mendix 11.4 release notes.
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