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.
How to create an API call using REST in Mendix
I recall my first project required numerous GETS and SETS of data between SAP and the application I was developing. Fortunately, a member of the team was a ‘core developer’ versed in Java and many other languages. He took those requirements and ran with them while I and others focused on the business workflows and front-end of the application.
The configuration of the app was a bit different in that the client didn’t want to use SAP’s Web Services, but instead connect Mendix to an API server that would manage security and connections between SAP and it via Remote Function Calls, or RFC’s. I understood everything about the application...except the magic of the API call. Remember, my background is BI and Analysis: SQL I get but API, JSON, RFC...those were foreign words to me.
Profiled at Mendix
A few months back, Mendix reached out to profile me on their blog. Here's the link:
http://www.mendix.com/blog/developer-profile-nolan-ramsey-epi-use-america/
How to build a better analytic engine in Mendix
I was recently asked my thoughts on how I would solve a slow reporting and analytic environment within Mendix. The developer described the following scenario:
I have been working on a project that creates a lot of data (millions of records per year) with no issues but I am not so happy about the analysis and reporting side where dealing with the large number of records means I need to summarise/abstract many views in order to get a reasonable response. What I have works but I wonder whether there is a better solution that will provide even more benefits for the client. With this in mind I was looking to get in contact with the person who blogged with a view to discussing/sharing approaches and how to optimise such large data set BI type applications using Mendix.