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

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

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

Good idea!

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