Best Practice Recommender

Last modified: August 20, 2024

Introduction

Best Practice Bot was rebranded to Best Practice Recommender in Studio Pro 10.12.0.

Best Practice Recommender works both online and offline. No internet connection or signing-in is required.

Best Practice Recommender is an intelligent virtual co-developer assistant that helps you improve your app by inspecting your app model against Mendix development best practice in Mendix Studio Pro. It detects anti-patterns during the design and development, pinpoints you to these anti-patterns, suggests you how to resolve it, and in some cases can automatically fix these issues.

Best Practice Recommender is built using statistical analysis of thousands of anonymized Mendix app to learn common anti-patterns as well as using Mendix Expert Services best practices in the development of microflows, domain models, pages, security, and so on.

It consists of a three-level assistance:

Detection – it inspects the model, identifies issue, and pinpoints you to the document/element causing the issue.
Recommendation – it explains the identified issue, the potential impact, and how to fix it. There is also a detailed best practice guide with a dedicated step-by-step guideline of how to fix the issue.
Auto-fixing – it can automatically implement the best practice and fix the issue.

Best Practice Recommender Pane

To access settings of Best Practice Recommender, open Edit > Preferences > the Maia tab > Best Practice Recommender section. For more information, see Preferences.

Best Practice Recommender is enabled by default and is designed as a pane. To access the Best Practice Recommender pane, click View > Best Practice Recommender.

The pane gives you information on each anti-pattern and contains Best Practice Recommender settings and configurations:

Options and Configuration

At the top of the Best Practice Recommender pane, you can see the following options:

Inspect now – Inspects your app model on the development anti-patterns and issues in your app.
Limit to current tab – Filters to only show detected anti-patterns in the current tab (document).
Limit to uncommitted – Filters to only show detected anti-patterns of the changes that have not been committed to version control.
Export – Exports the recommendations to a CSV file. Suppressed recommendations are excluded.
Configuration – Defines the modules and documents that the Best Practice Recommender will analyze. Click the Configuration button to open the Best Practice Recommender Configuration dialog box that contains the App Model and Best Practice tabs.
- The App Model tab lists all relevant documents in your app. You can choose which specific modules or documents to inspect or leave out.
- The Best Practice tab lists the available best practice. You can choose your preferred best practices and inspect your model against it:

You can use both app model and best practice configuration together.

Anti-Pattern Overview

Each anti-pattern line in the pane provides you with the following information:

Icon – indicates if the anti-pattern can be automatically fixed; if the icon has the “A” letter, the issue can be auto-fixed
Category - Indicates the type of development anti-pattern identified by the recommender, for example, Performance issues
Code – a unique code that is specific to the anti-pattern type
Blue circle – indicates a new detected anti-pattern
Message – description/explanation of the anti-pattern
Element – the element causing the issue
Document – the document containing the element
Module – the module containing the document

Right-clicking the message line of an anti-pattern in the pane opens the drop-down menu:

The following actions are available in the drop-down menu:

Go to Cause – takes you to the element causing the issue
Go to Usage – opens the corresponding locations where the anti-pattern is used
View Best Practice recommendation – opens the pop-up window with recommendations (similar to double-clicking the message)
Mark as read – marks the issue as read (this will make the blue circle to disappear)
Suppress this recommendation – suppresses the issue (this will gray out the issue and send it to the bottom of the list, and the related indicator in the editor will disappear)

Using Best Practice Recommender in App Development

Detecting an Anti-Pattern

The first level of assistance is detection that includes inspecting the app model, identifying anti-patterns, and pinpointing you to the document causing the issue.

To inspect your app model, click Inspect now in the Best Practice Recommender pane.

The Inspect now option will be disabled if there are consistency errors in the app. In this case, you need to resolve the consistency errors first.

The recommender will detect anti-patterns and list them in the pane under the associated anti-pattern type. To learn more about each anti-pattern type, click the anti-pattern code link. Click the arrow icon next to the anti-pattern type to see the detected cases of this type:

To view the element or the document where the anti-pattern is located, double-click the message line or right-click the message line and choose Go to Cause or Go to Usage in the drop-down menu.

Best Practice Recommender only detects a subset of the documented best practices. This is to avoid any false positives and to maximize the quality rather than the quantity of the recommendations.

Recommending a Fix

The second level of assistance is recommendation – giving you an overview of the issue and recommending how to fix it.

There are two ways to view the recommendations:

Right-click an anti-pattern message on the pane and select View Best Practice recommendation in the drop-down menu.
Click an indicator in the visual editor to view the detected issue:

The recommendation contains the description of the identified issue, potential impact from it, the way to fix it, and a link to a more detailed guidance on fixing the issue:

Auto-Fixing the Anti-Pattern

The third level of assistance is auto-fixing where the recommender can automatically implement the best practice and fix the issue in just one click. To avoid undesirable changes, auto-fixing is only available when the recommender can safely refactor the code without creating an error or making other undesirable change in the model. Each anti-pattern has an icon in the pane that indicates whether it is auto-fixable. If the icon has the “A” letter, the issue can be auto-fixed:

To auto-fix the issue, follow the steps below:

Click the corresponding indicator in the editor to open the recommendation or right-click the message line in the pane and select View Best Practice recommendation in the drop-down menu.
In the Recommendation from Best Practice Recommender pop-up window, click Fix:

After the issue is auto-fixed, a pop-up window listing the changes appears. You can click Show the fix to view the changed document and element.

Best Practice Recommender from the Command Line

Best Practice Recommender may also be executed from the command line, via the mx Command-Line Tool.