ThingWorx Ideas

Services are harder to debug due to lack of debugger to step through code.   This a standard component for programming / development in any IDE. Having this feature would reduce complexity of debugging code and make development faster.       An alternative solution to this problem is integrating composer with VS code so that editing a service opens a VS code window. Similar to how Unity is integrated with Visual studio. In Unity all UI development is done in Unity and writing code is done in visual studio.   This would be a more holistic approach that brings the best of both worlds in combining composer with a standard IDE to get a more robust development experience. ... View more

We have tried many things to come up with some sort of solution for printing reports within ThingWorx.  The latest solution that showed great promise was using SSRS.  The problem is that the US Government pigeon-holes their servers so badly and then locks down accounts so tightly that no one can use them.  ThingWorx DESPERATELY needs an internal strategy for designing and printing reports. ... View more

1. What version of Thingworx are you currently running? 9.2 2. Describe the problem you are trying to solve. Please include detailed documentation such as screenshots, images or video.  ThingWorx uses Rhino Javascript 1.7.11, and supports a number of ECMAScript ES6/ES2015 features. Some features like "set", could work but " requires VERSION_ES6 flag”. It would be great to have the option to enable this flag in the Thingworx settings. 3. What business value would your suggestion represent for your organization? Ability to use newer Javascript functions that will speed up the development. ... View more

Currently when a user clicks a row on a table its possible to use "selected rows changed" event with "selected rows" binding to open a popup with the values from the selected row.   However, a common use case is needing to open a popup with the value of the clicked cell (including which column & row was clicked).   This is possible with the collection widget but seems overkill for a simple functionality that's needed very frequently. Also the collection widget is not as performant as the advanced grid widget.     Advanced grid - current state: - Know which row was clicked - Know the values of the row that was clicked   Advanced grid - desired state: - Know which cell was clicked - Know the value of the cell that was clicked ... View more

As a recent post by The Great Vladimir reminds us, there are an enormous amount of valuable code snippets available in ThingWorx.   In my view, these built-in code snippets are a major part of the ThingWorx value proposition - however are mostly unusable as they do not have sufficient documentation and examples in order to a) know what they do, and b) be able to apply them to tasks in your own code.   My suggestion would be that SHORT documentation and examples be added within ALL of the code snippets.  This way the snippets and their doc/examples are managed within the code and do not require a separate documentation section which may get out of date, needs translation, etc.   Here are some examples of what the documentation should include: What the snippet does Required and optional parameters Explanation of the parameters (what does the input data look like, what will be output) Example working code snippet with input data   Certain explanations on commonly used input parameters should also however be improved as the have been lacking in the past (query, filter, ...).   ... View more

1. What version of Thingworx are you currently running? 9.2.1 2. Describe the problem you are trying to solve. Please include detailed documentation such as screenshots, images or video. Please make the date picker for services more flexible. Additions that can help: 1. Being able to select any point in time, not only 30-minute intervals (without editing the timestamp manually and typing the minutes out). 2. Being able to select seconds/milliseconds. 3. Having a more friendly way of picking a date/time. Look at alarm applications, there are infinitely many better ways to select a point in time other than dropdowns. Even just searching "date time picker" on Google images yields great results. 3. What business value would your suggestion represent for your organization? Makes dev lives much easier. ... View more

We would like the capability to create/embed test cases against ThingWorx services, there is a similar functionality in SalesForce for Apex.   Ideally capability would be BDD by design to simplify test case creation and maintenance. ... View more

The collection widget allows us to show property information automatically on the screen for many things, without the need for manual intervention. The issue is that you can't use the new extendable containers or even dynamic panels widget inside of a collection cell, due to the height of the cell being fixed through the collection widget properties. This would be useful for drilling down into more detailed information or to split out the data for the cell you've clicked on. My proposal is that an option is added to the collection widget, that allows (at least) the height of each cell to change dynamically, maybe based on the height of the mashup it contains, so when you expand a container in the cell mashup, the cell grows with it. ... View more

Hello Team,   There could be multiple scenarios we wanted to show dropdown widget inside Grid widget. Take a case, User wanted to upload multiple files as a first step, uploaded file names will be displayed in a grid with editable mode and wanted to textboxes, date time widget and drop down widget. But we somehow able use text box and datetime widget inside Grid widget but not with Dropdown widget. If you give solution for this need then lots of developer life would be easy and customer would be happy. Because of this limitation we end up in collection widget which has performance issue if we bind more than 20 records.   Please assist.   Br Prem ... View more

Contained mashups can be replaced with a collection widget that is somewhat faster (but not so much if all cards are different). But there are three problems: Collection widget is not responsive in height Collection widget cannot position each mashup in the exact position Like row 1 position 3, because it flows around. Collection widget in dynamic configuration needs a (web) programmer to handle and then the end customer (automation engineers) cannot build custom mashups Please help in solving these problems with Collection in Thingworx. Thanks! ... View more

In response to an Ask Kaya post titled "When will those 'Invisible at Runtime' widgets truly disappear?", one user suggested the following.   What could also be useful (instead of having to configure and use a validator) is the possibility to just "invert" a boolean returned from a service when creating a binding to another parameter or widget property. This would especially be useful for making a binding to the "Visible" property of a widget. Sometimes you only want to show a widget when a service outputs a boolean with a value 'false'. Nowadays you have to add a validator widget, create a parameter on it, bind the service to it, and configure the expression to invert the parameter, and then create a binding between the output of the validator and the property of the widget. That is a lot of overhead for just that, I believe. ... View more

Developing services directly in Thingworx via JavaScript sometimes is frustrating because of debugging by try and error or through logging messages. As a developer I would prefer a developing console in Thingworx which enables me the ability to directly execute code and get a adhoc result feedback. Similar to the dev tools in google chrome or better like jupyter notebook (https://jupyter.org/) which offers us: - Live Coding - Result visualization - Syntax highlighting - Code intelligence   ... View more

Currently Thingworx aggregate function is only applicable to infotable which is returned by a query service. Waiting for data to be returned from a query and aggregate the data slows down the performance. InfluxDB has native aggregate function at query level and implementing it to Thingworx built-in service will help to improve query performance and improve user experience.  ... View more

Today (Thingworx 9.1) an infotable property is only generating a data change event if the number of rows in the infotable changes. It should generate a data change event if any field in any row changes.    The use case is that when building SCO applications, many machine suppliers supply info via OPC UA Arrays and they become infotables in Thingworx. Then you need to be ablity to process event based business logic when any value in the table updates.    In a current project, the alarms from one machine comes via an three boolean OPC UA Arrays. They are 400, 400 and 50 in length. The only way they can be handled today is to either adress them as individual properties (if the machine supplier can supply that via OPC UA) or to fire events Always, which means that the check through the whole array for new alarms have to be executed every second.     If we could fire an event when a field in the infotable changes with the old and new values, it is a simple script to loop it and set/reset alerts based on the change. And it will be easier to both develop and maintain. And overall performance of the platform would probably be better.      ... View more

OOTB TWX status message are displayed as small non modal popup on top of the screen. They are not visible enough and do not prevent user from performing some other actions. End user may see the status message some time after the problem occurred and can be confusing. The request is to be able to configure the behavior of OOTB status pop-up: - more visible (center of the page instead of top, bigger) - modal for forcing user acknowledgement ... View more

I know that you can write code in other IDE's and then import entities back into thingworx, but this process is very lengthy with many steps between writing scripts and testing functionality within TWX. The other option is to develop directly within TWX, but then you run into source control/overwriting issues if multiple people are working on the same entity at the same time.   To add speed to development and resiliency to version control, something like github built into the composer would be extremely helpful. ... View more

Short story: I have recently had an issue regarding missing parameters that were new to particular version of TWX Platform. I was getting error message stating that I need a valid password, but the message was not useful for me at all, as it did not mention, which password does it mean. I could not find that I am missing some parameters unless I contacted support which told me there are 2 new fields that are required for TWX in platform-settings.json for H2.   The Idea: I thought about this case and I found that it might be useful if an error message would be followed by a link that could explain particular error more verbosely. It could be connected with particular feature/fix number or to a documentation article related with misconfiguration causing particular error message. This would be a great help when resolving setup issues. Labelling as per Platform and Analytics, but this is a general request to all your products. ... View more

Currently the in-built time series chart can support only 2K data points; this is not sufficient to meet our requirements as most of the sensor data coming in the platform have frequency of 1Hz (one data point per second), so if we can show only 2000 data points on a chart, it means we can at most show only 30 mins of data at a time. But we can have following use cases: Users need to monitor data across a process and sometimes these processes runs for hours, as such, 2000 data points won’t meet our requirements. For facility data, users need to see last 7 days data on the mashup, even if we downscale the data to one data point per minute, we would only be able to show maximum 1.5 days of data in this case. We also have some sensors with frequency of 10Hz and going by the recommendation above, we would only be able to plot 3 mins of data on the chart which is way too less. So, we therefore request to raise an enhancement ticket for this issue – the time series chart should be able to support at-least 20K data points to meet all our requirements. ... View more

As per the nature of ThingWorx, a Thing Hierarchy is set up using Thing Templates and Thing Shapes in order to model our devices/machines in the real world. Thing entities are created off of these Thing Templates/Shapes and inherits all the properties/events/services/subscriptions from its parents. Kepware allows us to easily retrieve information from the machines and send it to ThingWorx via the Industrial Gateway to map to our machine Thing entities. But when the inherited properties are bound to the Kepware tags from the Industrial Gateway, ThingWorx considers these newly bound properties as "overridden", therefore any changes to the property from the Thing Shape level may or may not apply.   If the property is set to "Fetch from remote every read",  this will causes an overflow of errors in the logs because all of those connected things that inherit the remotely bound property (that remains on the shape level) are trying to fetch but there is no connected corresponding Kepware property.    Thing Shapes/Thing Template should be able to work with Kepware in order to support both the ease of connectivity that Kepware brings and the inheritance model that ThingWorx is known for.  ... View more