Question

Where do I begin?

2

Hi, I am a self taught delphi programmer in the Netherlands with classic small animal practice software on the market. I work as a vet in an animal shelter in amsterdam where we are reviewing our options concerning automation. We have our customers in Microsoft CRM and our animals in an old school client server application written in Java. The latter can connect to the former. The java application greatly inhibits out ambitions for automating the workfloor when working with animals. Ideally we would like to build software on the existing database with the prospect of eventually replacing the java product all together. Also we would like to use tablets and phones. Would mendix be an options to achieve our goals? I am very learn by use oriented and I would like to be able to start making small simple solutions for existing problems as soon as possible. For that I would immedeately face advanced problems like creating a database in mendix but combining the data with the animal sql database and the crm customer database. What would be the fastest way to achieve my goals? Should I be looking for training days? Where? Should I do the online training and ask whatever comes up here? I found a thrre day course for Eur 1800 but I am afraid that is a bit much for our animal shelter. Hans Heinrtz

asked 2017-07-27

Hans Heintz

3 answers

Andrej Gajduk · Answer 1 · 2017-07-27

Hi Hans,

Great to hear you are looking into Mendix and I think it fits your goals very well, as it allows for rapid development of applications. Rgarding training I would recommend that you start with the mendix introductory online tutorial that you can find here: https://developers.mendix.com/training/#theCourses
You have access to all the videos and they a good job of covering the basics, meaning at the end you will be able to start building your application.

Regarding data migration, Mendix offfers ways to migrate data from existing databases or excel spreedsheets from your old data storage to your new mendix application see for example https://appstore.home.mendix.com/link/app/2888/

Hope this helps,

Andrej

Ronald Catersels · Answer 2 · 2017-07-27

Hello Hans, and welcome to the community.

Since you already know how to program I think you can just start with the modeler and try things out. If you want some guidance check the documentation for some learning lessons. After that just start building it is really not that hard. And when running into problems your welcome here to ask.

Now the other part. First problem is to get the data out of the other two applciations. You have multiple options here. In the appstore there is a database replication module. If you can make a connection to your other databases that might be the way to go. Other quick option would be if you could extract data from the current databases as CSV files. These can be imported again into Mendix. Check again the appstore. Another option would be if you could create a webservice on your current application. Because then you only have to build this once and you can easily sync the data from your current app to the new Mendix app.

And note that you can use a free sandbox to test your Mendix application. It has limitations (10 users and 100 mb data) but this might be enough to test Mendix out to see if it is the sollution for you.

Happy building,

Ronald

Hans Heintz · Answer 3 · 2017-07-28

Thanks for your answers.

If I were to migrate the data I would have to replace all existing functionality into Mendix alternatives at once. So my preferred option would to "build a webservice on my current application". How would I go about doing that? Let's say I focus on the animal database which is a microsoft sql server database. And are there serious performance or other disadvantages going about that way?