Shrink-wrap your widgets and themes on demand

If you are fortunate to develop on a Mac or *nix system and run your Mendix project on a shared folder with your Windows VM, there is a little bash script you can use to compress your widget- or theme-artifacts as they change. I’m sure there are other ways of doing this on a Windows machine, and if you know of a suitable approach, please let us know.

The first step is to put your code folder somewhere outside of your project, since you don’t want to commit this to TeamServer™. If you do, use your SVN tools to ignore that folder for the purposes of development. After you’ve set it up, launch your IDE.

I use Appcelerator’s TitaniumStudio™  as my preferred editor when writing JavaScript, in conjunction with FireBug or Chrome’s developer tools for the interactive command prompt. This is handy for real-time prototyping and then using those changes in your editor.

The problem I find is, every time I make small adjustments to my code, I have to compress the files back into a zip-file and restart my modeler to see the effects. The same actions apply to theming. You make minor CSS changes and the ritual of compressing restarting repeats.

I Googled around to brush up on bash scripting and I wrote a little looping bash script that executes a command every second, making sure my widget or theme package is always up to date. Here it is, continuous.sh:

#!/bin/sh
cycle() {
 while [ 1 ] 
  do sleep 1
  eval $*
done
}

Then you automagically shrink-wrap your package by running:

$ ./continuous.sh “zip -r -u path-to-your-widget/MyWidget.mpk path-of-widget-files-folder/*”

Now every time I make a change to my code, the archive gets updated automatically. I’m not a command-line wizard, but this does the job for me. All I need to do now, is restart my modeler. One day hopefully, I’ll be able to automate this too.

A video explains it a bit better if you have trouble following along:

Format String – Widget spotlight

There are a lot of widgets available in the Mendix Apps- & Add-on Store. Basic display widgets are sufficient for building forms, but sometimes you need a little more kick than what you get from the out-of-the-box widgets. For instance dynamic labels. Creating your own widget is an option, but don’t reinvent the wheel when someone already has, which you’ll find out when you visit the store.

I found Format string and it has some nifty applications. Think of it as an “über-label”, giving your Crud applications a little bit more character in terms of dynamic display. Its handy for dynamic label messages or basic reporting, by allowing you to format a string; very much in the same way we do logging-style messages in Mendix apps. You do this by setting a format string and replacement parameters.

Here is an example. I have a customer as an entity on my form. Instead of displaying a read-only Name and Surname Text box, you simply add the label and use the token place-holders:

Under Data source in the property panel, you select your attributes:

You could also have the ability to format dates and the option of rendering this as a div or an input. With a style formatting you’ll have a perfect header for your report or section in your form.

The result:

I’ve look for something like this for a while now, and this is perfect. It does exactly what I want when displaying dynamic labels.