Organize environment applications in Service Studio

I've created an application that allows you to create Application Groups, and also check dependencies and consumers between Groups:

• https://www.outsystems.com/forge/component/1770/overview/

Hope this helps.

CA

Possibility to create folders in Service Studio to group applications for a cleaner view and easier lookup of an application.

I'd say applications are already a way to group functionality, you have so many apps you need to group them as well? Also, just Service Studio wouldn't cover it, you'd need to have this available in LifeTime as well.

As a last comment, the title is a bit misleading, I thought you were talking about folders like Action folders (which has been posed as an idea many times before).

Hi Kilian,

Yes, applications are a ay to group functionality. But we have multiple applications for multiple customers. So a customer folder would be very easy to group them. And also we have multiple shared items such as connectors for different ERP applications and it would clean up my service studio start page very much!

I've changed the title to be less misleading ;)

Ok, I understand. That would indeed be useful. Liked.

Hi Martin,

I've created an application that allows you to create Application Groups, and also check dependencies and consumers between Groups:

• https://www.outsystems.com/forge/component/1770/overview/

Hope this helps.

CA

It would be cool to be able to group applications based on architecture similar to Discovery app.  Then maybe the circular references could be included automatically on this screen.

I would personally benefit from a structured applications overview in service studio.

At my work we have a lot of applications that are web, mobile, test applications, plugins, modules, demo, generic applications.

Basically I would like to distinguish the different apllications and categorize them in "folders" (or something equal). I would then be able to structure them  into applications that belong to each other or have a generic nature, etc...

Agreed!  This is a much needed feature.  The ability to organize into folders would help tremendously.

This is an often repeated idea, and rightfully so, specially in scenarios where there are dozens of Applications in an infrastructure.

Util there is a platform-level solution, you can try the simple tool Overview that I developed to arrange Applications into Groups, getting a higher-level view of the infrastructure.

CA

Hi Roeland,

Great feedback! I would really like to understand better the scope of the problem and I hope you can help.

Can you drill down on why you would benefit from having this structure, what is/are the problem(s) you face today that this would help to solve?

Thank you so much!

Hi Roeland,

Great feedback! I would really like to understand better the scope of the problem and I hope you can help.

Can you drill down on why you would benefit from having this structure, what is/are the problem(s) you face today that this would help to solve?

Thank you so much!

The concept of application is already a "folder" - a group of modules. You can freely categorize your modules inside applications.

What I really think the problem is, is that applications are also units of dependency management for lifetime. That means that we tend to make each app more granular to minimize inter-app dependencies, instead of organizing the apps in the logical business structure.

For example, if we have a module for logging, that is used in both a CMS and an ERP, we might create an app just for that specific module. But that module alone doesn't constitute an app. In no other technology you would call that an app - it's just a library. 

We are forced to create apps for technical modules that have no business value, increasing the clutter in the apps list.

There's a very good example of this force in the connectors published by OutSystems itself on forge. If you look at their architecture, all of them depend on something called Connector Services, which is just two extensions - BinaryConcat and JSONUtils. Recently, they even decided to split it further into Binary Concat app and (presumably) a JSONUtils app.

There are a couple alternatives, but all of them screw up lifetime dependency management. You could just include the logging module in CMS, but then you would have the ERP app depending on CMS app, which might not make sense. You could also just have the logging module in a global "libraries" app. That would indeed reduce clutter (all libraries would occupy a single app in the apps list), but it would make every app in your factory dependant on this "libraries" app.

Hi all,

Thanks for the discussion.

I do not want to overcomplicate things if there isn't a straightforward solution (in combination with lifetime) but I am searching for a way to simplify my work as a Outsystems developer.

I do not fully understand what Leonardo is proposing here. I'm an Outsystems developer for 9 months now so I might be lacking knowledge here. It sounds to be a bit of both that share the same end solution.

On the one hand think about how to organize your applications and decide when to choose a single applications with just one module or on the other hand make sure you structure your plugins and other dependencies under a single application.

I'll try to explain my point of view Andre.

As an Outsystems developer I would like to experiment, try out, learn, reuse with solutions from the Forge to come to a implementation of our own to put to production.

At the moment I'm experimenting with Maps and Geofencing for a Mobile app we are developing. Currently it resides in my personal Outsystems cloud (which obviously could also serve as a solution but isn't something I prefer).

Notice that for this experiment it already takes 15 applications where certain plugins  have 2 or 3 dependencies of their own. Not criticizing this because it only helps me.

But the development environment at my work contains several main production applications that also have their own plugins and generic applications. Besides experiments of other developers.

It all together clutters the "applications in Dev" overview where this could be solved with the option to put applications together in folder.

There might be other solutions to the problem that I do not know of. I'm open for any suggestion.

But if there isn't then this would be my "idea" to the problem.

Cheers,

Roeland

Thanks Roeland and Leonardo,

Your comments make a lot of sense and really help to understand the problem.

This indeed is a good one.

There are more people building in the (4 layer) architecture and by this, like Leonardo said, there a more applications created which doesn't make service studio 'cleaner'.

Folders can help organize the applications, but folders are always very personal (everybody has different folder structures). Besides that, it would also clicking more (folder, application, module) before getting to the module. Catagorize would be an option (OS applications (silkUI, Themes etc), library applications (google maps, sortable etc)

There are also other things to keep in mind, this is a problem for people with a lot of rights (example: I can see all application, but colleagues only see the applications there are working in). Another thing is that I don't click the applications anymore, I just use 'ctr o', search the module. It's so much faster.

Kind regards,
Evert

Also found another simulair idea:

https://www.outsystems.com/ideas/2722/folders-in-service-studio-start-page

And another one:

https://www.outsystems.com/ideas/2359/creating-folders-in-the-application-selection-service-studio

The ability to create folders is a requirement that makes sense.

And to the extent of my knowledge of the system's metadata structure, it us really easy to implement without having to change anything in the entities that already exist, as the folders would be only an abstract layer, that service studio would use to show the applications.

To those that don't want to use this, the root folder would behave as now, with the applications there like they are now.

When we have many applications in service studio the screen gets very confusing.

As a suggestion we could add some kind of grouping so we can separate the applications.

On a given server, there are to much large screen icons for everything and nothing, and there is no way to influence the display of them.

• Filters between apps, modules, mobile
• Smaller icons
• Search bar
• etc.....

Hi Patrick,

I'll merge this idea with the following:

https://www.outsystems.com/ideas/2691/organize-environment-applications-in-service-studio

This will bump up the number of likes and merge the comments ;)

Hi Daniel,

Should I merge this idea with this one?

https://www.outsystems.com/ideas/2691/organize-environment-applications-in-service-studio

Cheers,

The environment landing page could use capability to structure applications. Reordering, grouping, folders, ...

Anything to improve flexibility in displaying the applications.

Hi Joris,

There is already an idea around organizing the Application List inside Service Studio.

I'll merge these two ideas so that it will bump up the number of likes ;)

Cheers

In a companies where there are many applications, it is difficult to find what you want.

With the filter it becomes easier to do research.

Hi Luís, 

Can you elaborate on what do you mean with this idea?

I was trying to understand it and I can found application search in IDE (2 places) and in Service Center.

Service Center: 

Service Studio 1:

Service Studio 2 (open from environment):

Let me know more on this, please.

Cheers

Hi Nuno,

I had not noticed the top search, but the main idea was to make this interface like lifetime.

In lifetime when you deploy apps, you don´t see all  apps, just your.

If in service studio you have by default just our apps with possibility to change to see all, it is more ease to see and manager your apps.

In my companies we have a lot apps It's very complicated to find your all apps.

I did understand?

Thanks

LT

Hi Luis,

As Nuno said, Service Studio already has some search capabilities to search/filter your apps in the Application List although this could be more visible and easy to use.

There is another community idea that aggregates some improvements like adding search, recent, and different views for the Application List:
https://www.outsystems.com/ideas/2691/organize-environment-applications-in-service-studio

I'll merge this idea with that one (also adding the comments and votes), ok?

Cheers

Concerning the 4 layer model one creates more apps for 1 app (Like the core etc). This creates more apps in the application overview. If you could bundle the apps in a folder this could create more overview. 

It would be great if there was an option to create folders to store apps. This to get a structured overview. Now the apps are on one screen and could be time consuming to find the correct app when this screen is full of apps. 

Good idea!

Moreover, we should be able to organize our apps and/or folders with apps according to the 4-layer architecture.

That is totally right!  That is indeed the main reason why there are so many apps on the overview page. 

It could be very helpfull if in the development studio, the user could create folders (like the Independent modules "folder") where we could organize our work. 

With the time start to become very crowded with modules!!

Wouldn't it be easier to have some sort of solution explorer on the left (or right) side of the screen so you can easily locate and open other eSpaces without having to navigate through the main window?

Hi there,

It would be nice to have our own view of the applications in Service Studio. Also, do folders, bookmarks, etc.

Regards,

Edgar Ramos

On Service Studio we should be able to choose a different view of the applications, we should be able to list them and search for the app we are looking for, something like this:

Current layout: 

New layout:

Sometimes is really hard to find an app that's right in front of us, personally, having this list view it would be faster to get to the app I'm looking for.

Hi João,

How different would it be from this other idea: https://www.outsystems.com/ideas/2691/organize-environment-applications-in-service-studio?

I believe there are many different solutions to address this problem.

Also, do you know you can use the search on the top right corner to find an app by its name?

Cheers

Vasco

Hello Vasco, 

To be honest, I didn't know that, thank you for pointing it out! :) my life just got a little easier!
On what regards to the idea itself, indeed it should be similar to this idea, I believe the goal is the same.

Cheers,

João

We have a similar issue here. With the growing number of projects and teams, we have also started to use prefixes to "manually organize" the Applications List.

We hope that this will become a built-in feature we can use within Service Studio, or customize the Application List page to a plugin application.