Hello everyone! 

A new version of OutSystems UI was launched. As we promised on our last forum post, we have been working on extensibility for all patterns and this is a first release with some of those new features that we will explain below. 

Why do we no longer have Advanced Format?

As you might have noticed, we have removed AdvancedFormat from our revamped patterns. 

That methodology applied in the past brought several problems:

• Open the door for security breaches if the developer was not careful.
• Hard to scale and completely tied to a provider. If we wanted to evolve and modernize with a more recent provider we wouldn’t be able since it would break the existing code base, being a breaking change.
• No metrics to help us evolve the product. We couldn’t track missing features that we could provide to the whole community, being something hidden and hard to maintain.

We know that this is an essential feature that’s why we adopted another strategy more secure and in low-code to help you extend our patterns.

What’s the new solution? 

The new architecture allows us to be much more agile in adapting and exposing new functionalities through client actions and/or javascript APIs and we decided to adopt the same approach for the extensibility features. 

As a starting point, we decided to focus on the patterns with external providers.

To extend those patterns you can access the provider configs we offer in low-code through client actions or you can use our API to take advantage of all the available configs that the provider offers.

We are going to focus now on the 3 different types of client actions that we offer:

• Set[ProviderName]Configs: offer you the structure of all the available options that you can apply to a given pattern. 
• Set[ProviderName]Event: allows taking advantage of the provider events.
• Unset[ProviderName]Event: allows clearing the provider events. 

Note: Not all of the extended configuration options are available through the ProviderConfigs parameter structure. This is due to some incompatibility of the default input parameters or client actions already available for those patterns. For full access to the provider options, use our API methods.

How to use the client actions? 

For a more detailed explanation, you can check our documentation on OutSystems UI patterns extensibility. 

Which patterns can be extended?

The following table shows the OutSystems UI Patterns that use external providers:

What's going to happen next? 

We hope to get feedback from you about these new features. Meanwhile, we will keep working on these client actions to include more provider options and keep exploring the extensibility topic for our patterns.

These patterns will be released in the near future (next 6 months):

Try it now

Check more details about the new release in the Release Notes and download the latest OutSystems UI version.