IoT & Connectivity Tips

Hi everyone,   Maybe you got my email, I just wanted to post this also here.   I built a CSS generator for a few widgets, 8 at the moment. This is on a cloud instance accessible by anyone.   Advantages:      - don't have to style buttons and apply style definitions over and over again      - greater flexibility in styling the widget      - you don't have to write any CSS code   The way this works: you use the configurator to style the widget as you want. Use also a class to define what that widget is, or how it's styled. For example "primary-btn", "secondary-btn", etc. Copy the generated CSS code into the CustomCSS tab in ThingWorx and on the widget, put the CustomClass specified in the configurator.   As a best practice, I'd recommend placing all your CSS code into the Master mashup. And then all your mashups that use that master will also get the CustomCSS. So the only thing you have to do to your widgets in the ma

5 Common Mistakes to Developing Scalable IoT Applications by Tori Firewind and the IoT EDC Team Introduction To build scalable applications, it’s necessary to identify common mistakes and avoid them at the early stages of development. In an expert session this past month, the PTC Enterprise Deployment Team elaborated on why scalability is important and how to avoid the common development pitfalls in IoT. That video presentation has been adapted here for visual consumption of the content as well.   What is Scalability and Why Does it Matter Enterprise ready applications can scale and easily be maintained, which is important even from day 1 because scalability concerns are the largest cause for delays to Go Lives.  Applications balance many competing requirements, and performance testing is crucial to ensure an application is ready for Go Live. However, don't just test how many remote assets can connect at once, but also any metrics that are expected to increase in time, lik

  ThingWorx 9.2 is here! Deploy an entire solution and all its dependencies in one click with Solution Central’s one-click deploy, garner deeper analytic insight with our new waterfall charts, and manage and authenticate users more seamlessly with an Azure Active Directory integration. Discover these features and more in my 9.2 preview post here!   Review our release notes here and be sure to upgrade to 9.2!   Stay connected, Kaya

We will host a live Expert Session: "5 Common Mistakes for Developing Scalable IoT Applications" on June 22nd, 11h00 EST.   Please find below the description of the expert session and the registration link.   Expert Session: 5 Common Mistakes for Developing Scalable IoT Applications Date and Time: June 22nd, 11h00 EST Duration: 1 hour Host: Tori Firewind, Mike Jasperson and Prachi Rath - Enterprise Deployment Center Registration Here: https://www.ptc.com/en/resources/iiot/webcast/5-common-dev-mistakes-for-scalable-iot-applications    Description: To build scalable applications, it’s necessary to identify the common mistakes made and ensure to avoid them at the early stages of development.   In this expert session, the PTC Enterprise Deployment Team will elaborate on why scalability is important and how one can avoid the common development pitfalls in IoT.    Existing Recorded sessions can be found on support portal using the keyword ‘Expert Sessions’.

ThingWorx community,   As part of a continuous re-evaluation of our third-party software requirements, we regularly add and remove support for versions of operating systems, persistence providers, and web browsers.   On this note, we are planning to end support for Ubuntu 18.04 beginning with the ThingWorx release targeted for mid-CY2022. Per its release cycle, Ubuntu will move version 18.04 into Extended Security Maintenance at this point, meaning it will no longer receive regular maintenance updates.   PTC will continue to support Ubuntu 20.04 for the immediate future and will consider supporting Ubuntu 22.04 once it becomes Generally Available (GA).   Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns.   Regards,   Walter Haydock ThingWorx Product Management

  Hi, everyone!     Today, we’re launching an exciting new series called “PTC Community Spotlights.” Each post in the series explores a community member’s experience with ThingWorx—how they’re using it, what their favorite part about ThingWorx is, and any tips or tricks they may have to share with the PTC Community.   For the first installment, I spoke with @nmilleson of EAC. Check out our conversation below. Our first PTC Community Spotlight Speaker -- Nick Milleson of EAC Product Development Systems. @Kaya: Hi, @nmilleson, welcome! Thank you for taking the time to meet with me and volunteering to be our first ThingWorx Community spotlight!   @nmilleson: Of course, @Kaya. Happy to be here.   @Kaya: To start, can you tell me a little about yourself?   @nmilleson: Absolutely. My name is Nick Milleson.  I work as an IoT Solution Architect at EAC Product Development Systems (a PTC Partner). I’m located in Apple Valley, Minnesota, which is

Thread Safe Coding, Part 1: The Java Extension Approach Written by Desheng Xu and edited by @vtielebein    Overview Time and again, customers report that one of their favorite ThingWorx features is using However, the Javascript language doesn't have a built-in semaphore locker mechanism, nothing to enable thread-safe concurrent processing, like you find in the Java language. This article demonstrates why thread safe coding is necessary and how to use the Java Extension for this purpose. Part 2 presents an alternative approach using database lockers.   Demo Use Case Let's use a highly abstracted use case to demo thread-safe code practices: There are tens of machines in a factory, and PLC will emit a signal to indicate an issue happens during run-time. The customer expects to have a dashboard that shows today's total count of issues from all machines in real-time. The customer is also expecting that a timestamp of each issue can be logged (regard

When to Include InfluxDB in the ThingWorx Development Lifecycle (this article is also available for download as a PDF attached)   The Short Answer InfluxDB is a time series database designed specifically for data ingestion. Historically, InfluxDB has been viewed as a high-scale expansion option for ThingWorx: a way to ensure the application works as intended, even when scaled up to the enterprise level. This is certainly one way to view it, because when there are many, many remote things, each with a lot of properties writing to the Platform at short intervals, then InfluxDB is a sure choice. However, what about in smaller applications? Is there still a benefit to using an optimized data ingestion tool in any case? The short answer is: yes, there is!   Using InfluxDB for optimized data ingestion is a good idea even in smaller-sized applications, especially if there are plans to scale the application up in the future. It is far better to design the application around InfluxDB

Recently I have been accompanying an integration partner and end customer around an issue experienced with ThingWorx resource exhaustion.  Early on it seemed like this was an issue with the ThingWorx Azure IoT Hub Connector as it would freeze up and become unresponsive.  Following a root cause analysis it became clear that it was actually caused by a lack of a number of standard cloud design patterns, which if used would have automatically adapted operation of the overall solution to be far more resilient as well as resource optimized.   The way that the logic was structured, it prioritized job execution on entities with the oldest last success time and would continue to retry these executions (IoT Direct Methods) every few seconds until successful.  There were a number of problems here, but I'll unpack a few in order to tie the problem to the solution via design patterns.   1) No exception handling When the direct method execution failed/timed o

In our interactions with PTC customers we often learn they have previously performed Analytics modeling in Python, Matlab, R, or even built home grown analyses in languages such as Java or C++. As expected, when adopting an Industrial Innovation Platform such as ThingWorx that also has its own ThingWorx Analytics module, customers do not want to reimplement everything from scratch and would rather integrate their previous work in the Smart Applications built in ThingWorx, leveraging a combination of their existing toolset together with ThingWorx Analytics modeling. That is certainly possible and there are multiple ways to do that. In this article we will focus on several general ways to make that happen, but it is important to keep in mind that language specific approaches are also possible and we are happy to discuss those in the specific context of the customer.   Here are five different ways to bring existing Analytics into ThingWorx: If the task is to reuse an existing predi

Original Post Date:     June 6, 2016   Description: This is a video tutorial on creating a DataTable with a DataShape, and adding and retrieving an entry.  

  Sunshine, beach chairs & ThingWorx 9.2. What more could you need for your summer essentials?   Targeted for June 2021, our next release features intelligent one-click deploy with Solution Central*, new web components, and an enhanced IAM integration!   Let’s dive deeper into each.   Deploy an entire solution in one click with Solution Central’s intelligent one-click deploy.Good news: you followed a modular design pattern and broke up your application into smaller libraries and components. You can now enjoy easier maintenance and re-use of your app. Bad news: your app now has 10 different dependencies, with differing versions, each with a required order to import into ThingWorx. Now, try to share these modules with colleagues, or use them on environments where code may already exist. Not exactly a day at the beach, right? Fear not, one-click deploy has you covered. You click the button, we spin through and find the right dependencies, the right versions, the

Unlocking the Power of Industrial Data Presentation by Mike Jasperson, VP of the IoT Enterprise Deployment Center   his video presentation was performed at the Digital Transformations in Manufacturing conference of 2021, hosted by Enterprise Digital. In this presentation, Mike Jasperson goes over the benefits to modernizing and consolidating access to time-stamped data that is ingested from equipment and sensors into a central location like ThingWorx. Moving away from monolithic, legacy, and siloed systems, and towards more agile solutions, has never been more critical in order to increase machine, operational, and business efficiencies while also opening up visibility into data systems and infrastructure deployments.   This video partners with InfluxData to help customers extract value from IoT data systems, maximizing both performance and operational capabilities of their monitoring systems. To stay competitive in the IoT market, it's important to review the best prac

This might be a well-known topic for some, but I recently had a need that Event Routers fit into perfectly and wanted to share. If you have some neat applications for Event Routers on mashups, feel free to reply!   What? Event Routers are a function on Mashups that let you connect multiple inputs to a single output. For my use case, this was extremely helpful to let me have two different Service Outputs go to the same Widget. They are a really simple tool that can save a lot of headache.   How? Event Routers work by funneling the latest data through to a single output. This is particularly useful for  user-activated actions with the output tied to a widget or another service. The Event Router automatically activates when any one of the Inputs changes.   Example I have two services that generate HTML from different sources, but I want to display just the latest one that the user had activated in a single HTML Text Area widget. The two different services are activated

Datasets with ordinal or categorical goal cannot currently be used in ThingWorx Analytics Builder. However this is only a UI limitation, ThingWorx Analytics Server can handle those data. It does simply require to use the services from the AnalyticsServer-Training and AnalyticsServer-Prediction things to perform the operations.   This can be done using a mashup or via Rest API call (see https://www.ptc.com/en/support/article?n=CS271485 ) . The below video expands on the mashup solution. Attached are also the entities used during the video and a sample dataset with ordinal goal.     Update for ThingWorx 9.0  The API has changed in 9.0, use the entities Entities-90-3Jun2020.xml for release 9.0  

Hi everyone,   We’re back! And we’ve got exciting news about Solution Central! As tempted as I am to share the news myself, I thought it only fitting to have Janie Pascoe, Product Manager of Solution Central, share the news with you. You may remember Janie from this post on ThingWorx's OPCUA functionality or this one on what it’s like to transition from a ThingWorx developer to a ThingWorx product manager. Janie, welcome back! The floor is yours.   Janie, PM of Solution Central: Thank you so much Kaija. I wanted to bring your readers up to speed on some of the latest and greatest in Solution Central. If you haven’t logged in to the Solution Central portal in a while, I highly recommend you do so because you will immediately be notified of what’s new in the application as you can see here due to our newly added what’s new popup blurb!     But in the spirit of giving you even more detail, let me tell you a bit more about what is new in Solution Central 3.0. This rele

Interested in learning how others using and/or hosting ThingWorx solutions can comply with various regulatory and compliance frameworks?   Based on inquiries regarding the ability of customers to meet a wide range of obligations – ranging from SOC 2 to ISO 27001 to the Department of Defense’s Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) – the PTC's IoT Product Management and EDC teams have collaborated on a set of detailed articles explaining how to do so.   Please check out the ThingWorx Compliance Hub (support.ptc.com login required) for more information!

Analytics projects typically involve using the Analytics API rather than the Analytics Builder to accomplish different tasks. The attached documentation provides examples of code snippets that can be used to automate the most common analytics tasks on a project such as: Creating a dataset Training a Model Real time scoring predictive and prescriptive Retrieving the validation metrics for a model Appending additional data to a dataset Retraining the model The documentation also provides examples that are specific to time series datasets. The attached .zip file contains both the document as well as some entities that you need to import in ThingWorx to access the services provided in the examples. 

  Hello everyone,   If you’re like me, you’re always looking for the optimal or most efficient way to do something. Today, I’ll share a quick trick and two tips to help you develop your awesome IoT solutions with ThingWorx.   #1. Trick: Finding Dependency References We are targeting a new “Where Used” Composer feature in an upcoming release of the platform to help you find your references of bindings, properties, mashups, and services. In the meantime, did you know you can get some of that information yourself today with a quick service call?   As of ThingWorx 8.5, a new service is present on Project entities; the service crawls the contents of your project and highlights the full external dependency list to help you find references. On any Project Entity, ListExternalDependencies() shows output like this in 9.0:  ListExternalDependencies() output   For each entity (“A”) in the project, the service calls out any entities (“B”) that it is refere

By Tim Atwood and Dave Bernbeck, Edited by Tori Firewind Adapted from the March 2021 Expert Session Produced by the IoT Enterprise Deployment Center The primary purpose of monitoring is to determine when your application may be exhausting the available resources. Knowledge of the infrastructure limits help establish these monitoring boundaries, determining straightforward thresholds that indicate an app has gone too far. The four main areas to monitor in this way are CPU, Memory, Networking, and Disk.   For the CPU, we want to know how many cores are available to the application and potentially what the temperature is for each or other indicators of overtaxation. For Memory, we want to know how much RAM is available for the application. For Networking, we want to know the network throughput, the available bandwidth, and how capable the network cards are in general. For Disk, we keep track of the read and write rates of the disks used by the application as well as how

When I tried to set String property values with Chinese letters by using C SDK, I could see only broken characters in Thingworx. The cause of the problem is simple and it's encoding. In order to solve this problem, you need to convert encoding to UTF-8 in your C code. I used 'libiconv' library to do it. This guide is for Win32 version. If you want to make a library for other platforms such as Linux, you can create or get a library for your own by googling.How to Get the Source Code of libiconvAt the moment, the most recent version of libiconv is 1.15. You can download the source code of libiconv from here.How to BuildI used MS Visual Studio 2012, but the explanation can be applied to the earlier versions of MS Visual Studio and express editions.Step 1. Download the most recent version of libiconv and unzip the file.Step 2. Make a new Win32 Project.Let's say "libiconv" as the project name. Check to create directory for solution.Choose DLL as the application type and check Empty Project

Check our expert session recorded library! The recordings will also be published in our Customer events library, posted on each event. Stay tunned!   Your feedback is very important to us! After watching the recordings, please take 2 min to complete this survey   Thingworx Foundation Session Name Link Duration Thingworx Mashup 101 - Do's and Don'ts Recording link 00:33:41 Thingworx Active Active Clustering (High Availability Recording link 00:26:24 Upgrade to Thingworx 9 – How to Plan / Evaluate Impacts Recording link 00:27:02 Thingworx Flow Overview Recording link 00:43:40 Top 5 items to check for Thingworx Performance Troubleshooting Recording link 00:26:55 ThingWorx DEVOPS QuickStart Guide Recording link 00:45:05 ThingWorx Backup And Recovery Recording Link 00:20:14 Expert Session - Designing your Data Model in Thingworx Recording link 00:26:45 ThingWorx Installation Recording link 00:15:07

We will host a live Expert Session: "Top 5 Thingworx environment monitoring best practices" on March 25th, 10h00 EST.   Please find below the description of the expert session and the registration link.   Expert Session: Top 5 Thingworx environment monitoring best practices Date and Time: March 25th, 10h00 EST Duration: 1 hour Host: Tori Firewind, Tim Atwood and Dave Bernbeck from Enterprise Deployment Center Registration Here: https://www.ptc.com/en/resources/iiot/webcast/top-5-thingworx-monitoring-best-practices    In this session, we will be reviewing the main monitoring practices to keep a heathy environment and discuss the main issues from the audience. Bring your questions!.   Existing Recorded sessions can be found on support portal using the keyword ‘Expert Sessions’. You can also suggest topics for upcoming sessions using this small form.   Here are some recorded sessions that might be of your interest. You can find recordings for the full li

We will host a live Expert Session: "Top 5 Thingworx environment monitoring best practices" on March 25th, 10h00 EST.   Please find below the description of the expert session and the registration link.   Expert Session: Top 5 Thingworx environment monitoring best practices Date and Time: March 25th, 10h00 EST Duration: 1 hour Host: Tori Firewind, Tim Atwood and Dave Bernbeck from Enterprise Deployment Center - Enterprise Deployment Center Registration Here: https://www.ptc.com/en/resources/iiot/webcast/top-5-thingworx-monitoring-best-practices    In this session, we will be reviewing the main monitoring practices to keep a heathy environment and discuss the main issues from the audience. Bring your questions!.   Existing Recorded sessions can be found on support portal using the keyword ‘Expert Sessions’. You can also suggest topics for upcoming sessions using this small form.   Here are some recorded sessions that might be of your interest. You can

We will host a live Expert Session: "Thingworx Mashup 101 - Do's and Don'ts" on February 24th, 13h30 EST.   Please find below the description of the expert session and the registration link.   Expert Session: Thingworx Mashup 101 - Do's and Don'ts Date and Time: February 24th, 13h30 EST Duration: 1 hour Host: Aanjan Ravi - Technical Product Manager Registration Here: https://www.ptc.com/en/events/thingworx-mashup-101   Description: This session covers the most common and useful tips about how to correctly use Mashup builder, Widgets and Layouts – and what to avoid -  to create applications with good principles of UI/UX and easier to maintain.   Existing Recorded sessions can be found on support portal using the keyword ‘Expert Sessions’. You can also suggest topics for upcoming sessions using this small form.   Here are some recorded sessions that might be of your interest. You can find recordings for the full library of webinars using the keyword ‘Ex