Introduction to Adaptable Solutions

Last modified: April 18, 2024

1 Introduction

This section provides information and best practices on how to develop adaptable solutions on the Mendix Platform that are ready to be sold on the Mendix Marketplace.

While Mendix best practices for development apply, there are additional considerations when architecting and developing a Mendix solution.

2 What Is an Adaptable Solution?

In an adaptable solution, up to 20% of the end solution can be adapted through customizations, extensions, integrations, or new customer-specific modules. Instead of being tied to a prescriptive software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution that only allows for configuration at runtime, adaptable solutions allow for design-time adaptation through model-level changes to cater to the needs of your specific implementation.

Adaptable Solution architecture

3 Use Cases

As a concept, adaptable solutions work both for ISVs (for example, in the Mendix Commercial Solution Partner Program) and in the enterprise context.

3.1 ISV Commercial Solutions

ISVs can create and sell solutions that can be adapted for every individual customer. This allows them to be more relevant to their customers by being able to adapt the application to specific requirements in UI/UX, process, data, and integration. The delivered solution is upgradable so the ISV can deliver innovations and improvements.

3.2 Enterprise Context

In larger enterprises, a typical situation occurs in which various departments or regionals have the same need, but they are also (slightly) different from each other. Adaptable solutions allow for the centralized development of the core solution while different teams can make adaptations themselves. Through upgrades, the centralized team can push common functionality to the different teams. An IP-protected and immutable core ensures that the implementation teams only adapt what is needed in order to minimize the impact of upgrades and adaptation effort.

4 Solution Lifecycle

The solution value chain and lifecycle consists of three important phases:

Phase Party Purpose
Building the solution core ISV Create a solution that is designed for adaptation. New versions are periodically released.
Implementing for a customer ISV, the customer, or an implementation partner Adapt the solution to the individual customer’s need and apply upgrades. Include changes to UI, data, logic, or integration in the customer landscape.
Consuming in production Customer Production usage of the application by the customer. Functional admins can perform day-to-day tasks.

The solution lifecycle can be visualized in this diagram:

Adaptable Solution Lifecycle

4.1 Implementation as a Separate Model Instance and Cloud Node

The customer implementation is a separate upgradable model instance (fork) per customer that shares generic functionality from the original solution model and that is deployed to separate cloud resources.

Adaptable Solution Deployment

The separate model instance allows the implementation team to fully customize all non-IP protected functionality. Not all customer implementations require changes to the model. In those cases, the original model can be deployed as is.

For more details, see the Implementation per Customer section of How to Architect Adaptable Solutions.

5 Three Parts (Core, Adaptations, Extensions)

Architecting a solution for adaptation requires an understanding of your customers’ needs. You need to know which functional requirements are common across your customers and which are specific to individual customers. This enables grouping the modules in the application model into three main functional parts:

  • A shared and immutable common core
  • Common modules that can be adapted to a customer’s needs
  • Customer-specific extension modules
Three parts of the adaptable solution

These different parts work together in the customer implementation. It is important to maintain these distinctions, because there is an inherent tradeoff: What is part of the common core and IP-protected cannot be adapted or modified, while what can be adapted can never be protected. This boundary can be created at a fine-grained level. All adaptation (both extensions and adaptable core) can make use of functionality from the common core. For more information, see the Application Design section of How to Architect Adaptable Solutions.

This table describes the three main functional parts in more detail:

Part IP-Protected Responsibility Upgradable Purpose
Immutable common core Yes Build team Yes, drop-in Core of the application (for example, data model, workflow actions, standard integrations)
Adaptable core No Build team for shared documents, implementation team for customer documents Yes, fine-grained merge Customer specific changes to the model (for example: workflows, data model extensions, customizable pages and snippets, theming, extendable microflows, translation and jargon)
Customer-specific extensions No Implementation team Not needed Added features for the customer (for example, integration with existing systems, additional visualizations)

6 IP Protection

To ensure that the intellectual property (IP) that is created during the building the solution core phase is not disclosed to implementation teams or customers, you can apply IP protection. This will also render those components immutable and make it easier to upgrade, as there will never be any merge conflicts.

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