cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 
cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Community Tip - Need help navigating or using the PTC Community? Contact the community team. X

What is your most common ThingWorx extension use case?

brue
1-Newbie

What is your most common ThingWorx extension use case?

I would like to see what our community has to say about their most common use cases for building extensions. Do you build small extensions that are isolated or do you build larger, more complex extensions that have dependencies to other complex extensions? No right answer here, just want to take a pulse on what you all have to say.

8 REPLIES 8

I had to build a Server Side Extension + Widget Extensions in order to give TimeZone support to TW:

  • Server Side --> Just a wrapper for existing Joda Time TimeZone functions ( Joda Time it's the library that TW uses to manage DateTime )
  • Client Side ( Widgets ) --> Rewrite standard TW Widgets ( Grid, Time Series, Label Chart, DateTime Picker, TIme Selector, Property Display, Export Data ) in order to support TimeZone

Then I had to write an extension to do some Server Side things that otherwise can't be done on for instance Hosted TW instance --> "Export To ThingworxStorage" to SystemRepository instead of export folder, calculate Checksum with TW function, Restart Tomcat server.

Carles.

qn
1-Newbie
1-Newbie
(To:brue)

I customized some existing extensions :

- DataExport with a service invoke to be triggered

- LogoutButton with size modifiable

- Grid shows only a number of rows of data. Otherwise, loading a few thousand rows of data is risky

Yay, I did the same with LogoutButton

vmihai
1-Newbie
(To:brue)

Hi Brian,

I usually build isolated extensions. I built one that animates a heart character at a certain frequency to illustrate pulse data values, a compass widget to display orientation and direction data from your phone.

I also extended the link widget to provide it with a navigation event.

One of the most complex extensions I did was to integrate human api with ThingWorx 5.2 and I had to use both an extension and a widget, because of the CORS restrictions...

Currently I would like to create an options select widget. The current auto-complete widget from the market place doesn't suit my needs entirely.

Thank you for opening up this post, it's very interesting to see what our ThingWorx community has done and learn from them.

Veronica

jasong
1-Newbie
(To:brue)

Our original product was based on ThWx entities, but with some changes that came in 6.x that more easily exposed our IP even running on hosted locked down servers, the extension package became the way we needed to go. It's a pretty large package.

I have about 150 million ideas for other extensions that we do not have time to make and they range from tiny to large.

jasong
1-Newbie
(To:brue)

I have a use case that I'd love to pursue but cannot because it does not appear possible. I want to write Read only properties values from my package. With the current state of how read only properties work, it seems almost useless - I really struggle with thinking of use cases as to why you would ever use them as they work now. If you can literally only write them based on default values on the property definition, then I just don't get it.

We have several of those properties that our package would like to update, or even just set initially, that the ThWx users including ThWx Administrators, should not be able to edit. Other platforms I've worked in allow App developers to write to ReadOnly properties in their own packages outside of the user's security context. Our package manages an integration with another system and because of that we have some shared ID/PKs that we could write in our integration/sync code but there exists no reason whatsoever that anyone should be able to edit them. Can't store them as a private value in the Thing either because it's blown away on thing (re)start.

I've tried to do this by switching to the Super User context but that doesn't seem to work.

Anyway, that'd be something I'd love to see and would fix what I see as a mostly useless feature.

wposner-2
12-Amethyst
(To:brue)

I've built a few...The most recent is an encryption extension.  The coolest, though, was a Natural Language Processing extension to be used with Thingworx Analytics.  It took care of all the feature engineering for a sentence/phrase based dataset and then fed it to Analytics to do various predictions.

I currently have the need to also create a Checksum extension, but it needs to work in conjunction with my encryption extension.  Right now I'm thinking about just adding it as an extra service that is exposed from my encryption resource.

posipova
20-Turquoise
(To:brue)

From the support perspective, a lot of customers take advantage of the custom extensibility option to tailor/add features to the existing wdigets.

Top Tags