Abillity to link Annotation in Domain Modal

Question

Abillity to link Annotation in Domain Modal

3

Within our company we want to document our intented changes, therefore we use annotations, both in Domain Modals as in Microflows etc. Within Microflows it's easy to link you annotation to one or more specific activities and such.

Unfortunately we currently (in Mendix 9) cannot link Annotations to Entities and/or Attributes within a Entity.

Nor we could link it to any other type of Domain Modal functionality (for example variabels)

We would love to have the abillity to 'assign/link' our annotation we we are beter able to specify to wich specific part in the modal the annotation is related to.

asked 2024-08-26

Samantha Schipper

5 answers

Created 2025-03-31

RAJU PATEL

Raghavendra Karthik Raja · Answer 1 · 2025-03-29

I always thought this was a basic functionality that should have been provided especially when I start working on existing large projects. But since not everyone puts in effort to tidy up the domain model, it will get very clumsy very soon. Maybe it's good to have all the available options which serves different purposes

1) Visual Indication as mentioned by Tom ( for general purpose annotations)

2) Link the annotation with entity ( for annotations that are very important)

3) Annotate sections of domain model or color code to highlight entities of new features

Tom van Zanten · Answer 2 · 2025-03-28

So far only 1 vote, being me? I am a bit surprised about that.

I understand domain entities have a document section which could be used to provide details, but so far I haven't seen many using this section, so maybe UX wise the design of this feature does not fit the actual usages? It requires two additional clicks to get to this information and to often conclude no information is provided there, so why do it a next time?

If annotation relations are not possible in the domain model, then the next best solution would be to:

1) Put a visual indication on the entity which alerts the developer about important documentation being provided on the entity, maybe this alert can be configurable on the document section itself, as not all documentation is 'important'

2) Put the documentation section outside the tabs of the entity edit page, it should be directly visible (at least partly)

Samantha Schipper · Answer 3 · 2024-08-26

Dear Arjun,

Thanks for you reply. I think having annotations linked to at least entities would help to have an overview when working in the domain model.

Thanks for your advice on the different where i can document comments, but it would be a nice feature to also be able to have that in de Model view (not after opening an entity/attribute)

ARJUN T L · Answer 4 · 2024-08-26

Hi Samantha Schipper

You cannot directly create an annotation-entity relationship as you can with flows. Instead, you can add annotations to entities through their documentation. You can also export the documentation to an HTML file containing an overview of your app by right-clicking on your project and selecting 'Export Documentation.

I hope this helps you.