Brace Yourselves: OutSystems IDE Quarterly Highlights Q3 2018
You are in for a treat! It’s been a while since our last little chat, and I have a ton of exciting news for OutSystems developers. I apologize in advance for the long post, but there are so many awesome things to share!
First of all, on the slim chance you missed our recent news, OutSystems 11 was just released, pushing low-code development one step further so developers can build even faster and better than before. You can scale large app portfolios effectively with microservices architecture. Dependency management enables you to make sure nothing breaks, eliminating the challenges of a microservices approach. And to make things even faster, you can deploy the services to container management platforms.
And there’s more—dozens of new or enhanced features were delivered to make your lives easier!
[OUTSYSTEMS 11]
First, let’s start with the new IDE features that are exclusive to OutSystems 11.
Screen Templates
Use pre-built templates and adapt them to your needs. You don’t have to build them from scratch anymore.
Replace Data
Quickly replace a UI data source by dragging and dropping another entity to the corresponding widget, such as a list or a form. The new data source automatically updates the dependencies, and the UI will be bound to the new attributes and aggregates.
Automatic Text Merge
Merge and resolve conflicts even inside text elements such as CSS and Javascript. The conflicts will be highlighted and you just have to click to select which rows you want to keep.
Inline Records
Quickly configure and parametrize the components you are using by creating inline records and record lists without losing context
Folders Everywhere in Service Studio
Easily organize the elements of your application, such as Entities, Structures, Images, and Resources in folders. Moreover, moving actions to a different folder has no impact on the references of the module consumers.
Disable Elements
You can now disable elements in the logic flow to test a new version of the code without those elements.
Web Block Events and Event Handlers
You can use events in blocks for web applications to build better and more reusable blocks, much like you do for mobile apps.
Styles Editor Improvements
Use grid units when you are overriding the styles of your widgets with Styles Editor, and you can style any element locally, even if you have a centralized theme according to architecture best practices.
Publish Outdated Consumers
When a module is published, some consumers may be outdated, triggering a warning in Service Studio. Just right-click the warning to open and refresh those consumer modules.
Boolean Conditions in Aggregate Joins and Filters Simplified
When working with aggregate joins and filters, you can now use “Is_Active” or “not Is_Active,” there’s no need to add True or False. After all, a Boolean is a Boolean, right?
Reorder Aggregate Filters
You can sort aggregate filters, which means you can arrange the filters in a way that’s most convenient for you.
WYSIWYG Editor Updates
Our WYSIWYG editor supports the latest CSS standards—variables, flexbox, and filters, for example. Screen and blocks’ previews are more accurate than ever.
Service Studio on 64 Bits
Service Studio 11 brings you high performance with 64-bit support, so you can work and deal with larger sets of modules.
[OUTSYSTEMS 10 and 11]
Are you blown away? Excited to get your hands on all this great stuff? Waaaiit, we’re not finished. The enhancements go on and on. We’ve worked really hard on these changes for OutSystems 10 and 11 because we know that they will accelerate your daily work. So, fasten your seatbelts and hold on tight!
Find Capabilities Taken to a New Level
Inspired by the many ideas from our community, we‘ve recently improved Service Studio's find capabilities. You can now find uses of entity actions, entity attributes, and static records, as well as understand where they’re being used without having to open the consumer modules.
Get Organized, Split Your Assigns
Are your assigns growing in complexity? Split them into a more manageable size by selecting the arrow in the corresponding assignment. It’s just that easy.
Copying Tabular Data
Remember testing query results and not being able to copy tabular data? Well, now it's possible to just copy it to the clipboard. And if you paste it into an Excel file, your data is automatically arranged in the appropriate cells.
Disabling Automatic Data Preview for Aggregates
If you need to do minor changes and tweaks to your data fetching, you can now deactivate aggregates’ automatic preview to have a smoother and faster experience.
Counting Selected Elements
When selecting multiple elements, you can see how many you’ve selected.
Warning Messages for Unused Elements
Whenever you have unused elements in a module (e.g. aggregates, site properties, sessions, and structures), you’ll receive a warning message. Delete them to clean up your code.
Check What's New in Service Studio
To check for new versions of Service Studio, simply go to Help > Check for updates...
Closing Modules
Manage your module as you would manage tabs on a browser. Right-click the module to “Close,” “Close other modules,” or “Close modules to the right” on the module tab.
Exporting Entity Diagrams as Images
Exporting entity diagrams as images is very useful, right? So it should be as easy as possible. Simply right-click an entity diagram and select Export to Image.
Find and Replace Faster
To find and replace, select text and press Ctrl + F or Ctrl + R. The search opens already populated with your selected text.
Finding Entity Actions
Now the global search also returns Entity Actions.
The Icing on the Cake
That’s a lot to take in, isn’t it? Well, I confess I’ve saved one other fantastic piece of news for last.
For Mac users, there’s a technical preview version of Service Studio for Mac where you can enjoy all the features we’ve shared in this article! Read the documentation page to learn all about it and to download this new version.
