Integration Pane

Last modified: March 31, 2025

Introduction

Use the Integration pane in Studio Pro to use available assets from the different applications in an organization into your Mendix apps. New apps can be created using shared entities, actions and events that are registered in the Catalog. In Studio Pro, this is possible using the integrated functionality of Catalog through the Integration pane.

You can search in the Catalog through the Integration pane to discover assets that you can use in your app. You can connect to services in your landscape by dragging elements from this pane into your app. For example, you can add the entities that are published in the registered OData services to your app’s domain model. These entities are called external entities and are different because they enable the connection to the data associated with the entities in the originating app. Besides external entities, OData services can expose actions that can be called from within microflows, and can define non-persistable entities that can be used as parameters or return types of these actions. You can also connect with business event services by dragging an event unto your app’s domain model. To display the Integration pane, click View > Integration.

The ability to search for Business Event services in the Catalog was added in Studio Pro 10.21. In earlier versions you can only find these in the Used in this app section, when they had been manually imported before.

Integration Pane Overview

The following functionality is available in the pane:

Search – Enter a search string of alphanumeric characters to search in the Catalog. The search will be performed on services, entities, attributes, associations, actions, business events and descriptions in the Catalog.
Filter – By default, the search is performed on assets in the Production environment. Click the Filter icon > Show development environments to include non-production and sandbox environments in the search.
View service information – When you enter a search term and browse through the results, you can see all relevant information for that service, including the assets that they provide for usage in your app.
View services used in this app – Services, entities, actions and events that are currently being used in your app are displayed in the Used in this app section. They are also indicated with a green check-mark in the search results. For more information, see the Used in this app section below.

Used in This App Section

When you do not enter search text in the Integration pane, then the Used in this app section is displayed. This shows the consumed services and the related external entities, actions and events used in the current app. The list of entities, associations, attributes, actions and events for the consumed services are shown as for the search results:

For more information on how to add entities and actions to your app, see Adding an External Entity to an App section in External Entities or Call external action. For working with business events, see Using Business Events.

Searching Catalog Sources

As you enter a search term, all the items in the Catalog satisfying the search string are listed in the search results. This includes words in the service, entity, attribute, action or event descriptions, which are not displayed in the Integration pane. For more information, see the Selected Asset Details section in Search in the Catalog.

You can drag an external entitiy or a business event from the search results into your domain model and it will be added to your app and displayed as an external entity or a specialization of the BusinessEvents.ConsumedBusinessEvent or BusinessEvents.PulbishedBusinessEvent entity, respectively.

Services that are set to Not discoverable in the Catalog are not be included in the search results for any user including owners of the service. To consume entities from these services owners must ensure that they are Discoverable.

Wildcard Search

You can perform a wildcard search by entering * in the search field.

The search strings must be a minimum of three alphanumeric characters. Punctuation cannot be used as part of the search term except for the wildcard character * to perform an “empty” search in the Catalog. You cannot use the wildcard in combination with other characters. For further details, see How to Search for Registered Assets.

Filtering Environments

By default, the search is performed on assets in the Production environment. To include all other environments such as test, acceptance, and also the Mendix free app environment, Sandbox in the search, click the Filter icon and check Show development environments:

When the Show development environments is checked, all subsequent searches results will also include those in non-production environments.

Integration Pane Information

The information that is displayed in the Integration pane either when you enter a search term or when you open the Used in this app section is described in the sections below.

Services

The search results and Used in this app section show the following information at a service level:

Service name
Application icon for the service (for example, Mendix, SAP, Siemens Teamcenter, or custom icons)
Service version
Environment name for non-production environments

Only the names of non-production environments are displayed. Services in a Production environment do not show an environment name.
Green checkmark if the service or a service’s asset is consumed in the app. If you right-click a consumed service, you can do the following:
- View in Catalog – click this to go to the data source details page in the Catalog
- Go to … – click this to open the corresponding document in this app
Gray shield icon shows if the service or entity is validated in the Catalog
Update icon is a blue arrow icon that indicates that there is another version of the consumed service available in the Catalog. Click to update the service that is consumed in the app to the contract that is now available:

The update feature is currently only available for OData services.

The service information presented in the Used in this app section represents the service that is currently consumed; information about the newer version of the service would be visible in the search results. In the example above, version 1.2.0 of BikeSubscriptionService is currently consumed in the app. If you search for “BikeSubscriptionService”, it will list the new service version, showing the elements of that newer version. Note that the newer version could include elements that are not available in the current version of the service that is consumed in your app, or conversely, your app could use elements of the service that are no longer available in the new version of the service.
Information icon allows you to view further details for the service and a link to go directly to the Service Details screen in the Catalog:

External Entities, Attributes, and Associations

External entities are grouped in the Entities folder, under the service name. Expanding an entity displays its description and attributes and associations.

In the search results, the visible elements are not all available elements in the service, but just the selection that matches the search term. For any service in the list, you can click Show details to see the full list of the exposed entities, associations, and attributes for that service.

The entities, associations and attributes that are not supported in your Mendix app are shown as non-selectable (gray) and will not be included when you drag them into the domain model.

Entity

If you right-click an entity and select View in Catalog, it will take you to the entity details page in the Catalog.

If you right-click a consumed entity and Go to entity, it will take you to the entity in the domain model.

Attributes

Attributes for a service are listed in the same order as how the service has them defined.

Unsupported attributes are grayed out and are not included when you drag the entity to your app.

Associations

The associations that are exposed in the services are listed after the attributes. Below each association you can see the entity it associates with, and a green checkmark if that associated entity is already present in your app.

Unsupported associations are greyed out.

Integration pane greys out unsupported elements

Actions

External actions are displayed under the service, below the entities, grouped in a folder named Actions. You can drag these actions onto a microflow, where they will appear as a Call external action activity. In this activity you can configure the parameters and result variable. If a parameter or result has an external or non-persistable entity as its type, it will add those to the domain model for you when you add the action to your microflow.

By clicking the expand button next to the action, the parameters and return type of that action are shown. You can right-click and select Find Usages in order to search for all the places the action is used throughout the app.

Actions that are not supported in your Mendix app are shown as non-selectable (gray) and cannot be dragged into a microflow.

Business Events

Business event services have a single folder, named Events, which contains the business events available in the service. These events can be consumed by dragging one into your domain model and choosing whether you want to Publish events and / or Subscribe to events. Clicking OK will create entities that represent the payload of the event you want to publish or subscribe to. In case of subscribing to an event, it will also create a microflow in which you can model how to handle this event.

Note that in the case of both publishing and subscribing to business events, there will be two different entities in your domain model. If your app does any operation on that event, it will show he green checkmark in the integration pane. As long as the event is not yet published or subscribed to by your app, but it is a capability the business event offers, you can drag it to your domain model.

Capabilities

If an entity supports Create, Read, Update, or Delete capabilities and it is also supported by Studio Pro, then it is displayed in the Integration pane. If an entity does not support any capability, it will be displayed with a yellow entity icon. Dragging this to your domain model results in a non-persistable entity in the domain model. For more information on CRUD capabilities, see Write Data to Another App.

A business event can be Published or Subscribed to, or both.