How to change the page styles dynamically at runtime [Edit 01/09/2001: Updated the sample to also override the colors in the popups] Service Studio gives you a few good options to define style sheets for you pages and emails. Besides the global style sheet that applies to the whole eSpace, you can add a custom style sheet to each web screen and email, and you can even define a custom style sheet for each web block. The platform will take care of including all the style sheets in the html of the page/email according to the following order: The...

Calling Screen Actions from custom JavaScript events Imagine you’re using the Tabs_ClientSide from RichWidgets and you’re showing a list in each tab. Instead of loading all the lists when the screen is loaded, you want to only populate each list when the corresponding tab is activated. The Tabs_ClientSide already provides a way to call custom JavaScript code on tab activation, so if we could call a Screen Action from JavaScript code, we could make that Screen Action refresh the table on the corresponding tab. So, how can we do that? The AJAX capabilities of the Agile Platform already allow you to trigger...

When you need to change a public element of an eSpace, such as an Action or a Web Block, it’s good to know before-hand where that element is being used, so you can anticipate possible problems. To do that, you can go to Service Center and check the References tab in the page relative to your eSpace. There you will find listed all the consumers of your eSpace, and if you click on the Details links next to each consumer eSpace, you can check which specific elements are being used: To help to improve this process, I’ve recently published the...

If you seen this post on the Agile Network Forums - Usability Tip (Ctrl+shift+click) - you already know a quick way to get some extra space between two elements in a flow. From 5.0.2.9 up, there’s an even easier way: just drag the the element, and if there’s little space, the flow will be automatically arranged: Technorati Tags: OutSystems, Agile Platform del.icio.us Tags: OutSystems, Agile Platform

In the previous post, I showed an accelerator to easily create a Query for an edit or show screen by dragging an Input Parameter of an Entity Identifier type to the Preparation. In 5.0.2, there’s an even easier way to do this. Create the EditRecord or the ShowRecord and drag the Entity on top of it. Then, if there’s an Input Parameter of the correspondent Entity Identifier type, a suggestion will appear in the Source Record property: Technorati Tags: OutSystems, Agile Platform del.icio.us Tags: OutSystems, Agile Platform

  Service Studio 5.0 had a lot of improvements in the drag & drop department. Some of them are listed in this great video from Rodrigo Coutinho - New in 5.0 - Drag & Drop – but there are a lot more. Here are 3 of my favorites that aren’t included in that video: If you drag an input parameter with an Entity Identifier type from the eSpace tree to a preparation or any other kind of action flow, a query to get the respective Entity will be created. This is very handy when creating edit or show...

Expression Editor had a lot of improvements in Service Studio 5.0. You’ve probably already found most of them, but just in case you haven’t, here’s a list of some of them: - The window is no longer modal so you can open several of them for comparison and copy/paste. - Besides dragging from the scope tree, you can now also drag variables & actions set as functions from the eSpace tree. - As you’re typing, the border of the text editor turns red when the expression is invalid, giving you immediate feedback when make a typo. Additionally, the case of variables and functions...

A little more than two years ago, shortly after the Agile Platform version 4.1 was released, the engineering team at OutSystems joined together and did a self review on what we could do to improve our ability to deliver faster and with better quality. We already knew that the developers that used the OutSystems Platform were much more productive than the ones using .NET or J2EE, but we wanted to raise the bar even higher, taking their productivity to the next level. The current version of Service Studio had a few Achilles’ heels that were being hard to get rid...