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Hello everyone,
This post is meant to fill the gap that Basic Rules of ThingWorx Development is having.
You can follow these rules even before starting the development process and keep them in mind to have an organized and easy to maintain application.
I will update this post in the future with more best practices and advice.
Best Practices and suggestions:
In order to have a clean and quick progress in any project the approach should be modular. If the modular approach is implemented also the development process should be thought of in a modular way.
This will give much needed independence to each individual developer especially if the team concurrently works on the same instance.
Some rules need to be in place in order for the project to be as smooth as possible:
<Client_Name><GUI/Business><Module_Name>
8. The integration of the modules will be done in the Master by a single person in charge with that master or by each developer at a time.
9. Depending on the case the Data Model could be treated as a module in its own right or can be integrated in each module if the project permits.
How to manage multiple users working on the same code in Composer:
(Thanks to Pai Chung)
Currently Thingworx within the development environment allows you to heavily document all your works, that includes ‘Save with Comment’. We encourage the use of the Documentation field and the ‘Save with Comment’ option.
However generally development is not isolated to one environment.
Thingworx provides several ways to back up the information.
Backup – this is a true Database backup that creates an additional database in ThingworxBackupStorage and basically can be used as a restore, by copying it back into ThingworxStorage
Export to ThingworxStorage – this is a full model export (with or without data) that can be triggered at any time. It can use Date filters to export according to Modified date. This is server side.
Export to File – this allows you to export a single or group of entities/data according to a variety of filters. This is client side.
Export to Source Controlled Entities – this allows you to export to a file folder structure or Zip that can be easily checked into a Source Control system.
How to approach Source Control:
To do a restore or deploy
6. Clean up dead entities (if there is a reference list)
Additional steps to take to help safeguard the development.
3. Full Export to ThingworxStorage to run every day after development stars - This can be scripted and triggered by a timer or scheduler subscription (<Server>/Thingworx/ExportDatabase/?WithData=true). In this way you have a backup with everything that was on before you started working each day so you can roll back if an error occurs.
CONTINUED 7 Sep 2015
How to organize wiring needs when developing the GUI:
Starting from the idea that we can divide the GUI elements in Display Elements and Action Elements I have created a common form in order to be filled with information necessary for the wiring of that Element.
UI Element Type | Display Element / User Action Element |
Thing Name | Name of the thing where data / service is found |
Service Name | Service inside the Thing that returns the data / is the subject of the action |
Property(ies) Name | Thing property / column name (when service returns an infotable) for Data Elements / Input parameters for the service to be run if User Action Element |
Additional Logic | Additional information regarding the way the information sources change when preconditions are met. Usually means new services or mashup logic is needed. |
I suggest that an additional companion document to the GUI description document to be created. This document will contain the previous form (table) for each screen/slide so that the work on specific screen/slide could be done independently.
To be continued...
Hello,
you write: "Backup – this is a true Database backup that creates an additional database in ThingworxBackupStorage and basically can be used as a restore, by copying it back into ThingworxStorage"
What do you mean with this ? And how do you perform such a backup. Also, I have not yet found out any documentation on what that ThingworxBackupStorage folder is used for. If you export Entities to ThingworxStorage, they always reside in the exports folder within the ThingworxStorage, not in ThingworxBackupStorage.
Regards,
Tom