Question

Dynamically run a mendix package within an existing mendix app?

0

We have a mendix application, which (through use of pluggable widgets) allows a user to design and share ‘dashboards’ (think something along the lines of Grafana). A simplified view of the app would be: - a page to list your dashboards – You can ‘open’ the dashboard to view and interact with it - a page for creating a dashboard (this part makes heavy use of pluggable widgets for drag and drop design) - a popup for sharing your creations with other users What we are being asked a lot is whether users can make their own dashboards using Mendix Studio Pro and then upload them to our app, instead of making them ‘within’ the app. I have no idea if and how this would be possible – does anyone out there? It does not sound particularly feasible to me, but maybe some Mendix guys can give some pointers?

asked 2021-04-01

James Ramm

2 answers

Robert Price · Answer 1 · 2021-04-01

Do you mean the users have a version of your app that they can run locally then export the data to your app?

If you do, then you’d need to think of a way to export the data (probably using a JSON Export Mapping) from their app and loading into your app (probably using a JSON Import Mapping) in a way that recreates all the entities.

This could get quite complicated depending on your domain model.

James Ramm · Answer 2 · 2021-04-02

The users are running our app on-premises yes. But, it is not just a case of wanting to create the dashboard ‘data’. What they want to do, is, instead of using our dashboard system, create their own mendix app, upload it to our app (somehow) and it would show up as a ‘dashboard’.

As far as I understand, this is basically dynamically adding a mendix module package to a running app…

My suggestion so far has been for the user to independently create and deploy a mendix app which uses our API, then we can provide an API whereby a ‘dashboard’ can essentially just be a link to this other app.

But this is not ‘ideal’ in that the preference is for a more integrated solution where a user doesn’t have to worry about deployment, authentication etc – they just ‘upload’ the package to our app and it is all taken care of...