Preferences

Last modified: December 20, 2024

Introduction

The Preferences option in the menu opens a dialog box where you can set user-specific preferences which apply to the whole of Studio Pro:

General Tab

Enable Autosave

When enabled, this option automatically saves your changes on various actions, such as running and deploying your app, executing version control operations (for example, committing, merging, or reverting), closing files or apps, exporting modules, or exiting Studio Pro.

Additionally, you have the option to enable autosave for any of these actions when you have unsaved changes. In such cases a dialogue box is opened, where you can choose to save or discard your changes. You can speed this process up by checking the Do not ask me again checkbox, which prevents further prompts and enables the autosave functionality.

Interface

Keep Active Document Selected in the App Explorer

When enabled, App Explorer automatically highlights the document that is currently active. When this property is disabled, the selection in App Explorer remains unchanged when the active document changes.

Show Styling For

The Show styling for setting configures which styling files are shown in the App Explorer.

You can select one of the following options:

App Only – This option covers the most common case and lets you customize your app-specific styling. By choosing this, you can see all files from the theme folder in App Explorer > App > Styling.
App and UI resources modules (Default) – This option targets developers who would like to create or edit UI resources modules, for example, to build or extend your design system/theme. This option also adds a Styling folder to modules that are marked as UI resources, containing the files from the corresponding themesource folder.
App and all modules – Additionally to the option above, this one adds a Styling folder to all modules, regardless of whether they are marked as UI resources or not.

For more information about the styling editor, see the Using the Styling Editor section in How to Customize Styling.

Error List

Auto-Check Delay

The Auto-check delay is the number of milliseconds that Studio Pro waits after a change, before starting the consistency checks. Increase this setting for large apps if Studio Pro responses slowly after changes.

Highlight Shown Errors and Warnings in the Editor

When Highlight shown errors and warnings in the editor is checked, the errors and warnings which are currently shown in the Error List (as determined by the Errors and Warnings toggle buttons and the suppression rules) will be highlighted on the affected elements in the editor.

Disk Location

Default App Directory

This is the directory where new apps are stored. It is used in the App Settings dialog box when you create a new app. If a different directory is selected in the App Settings dialog box, that directory is stored as the new default app directory.

Deployment Tab

In the Deployment tab you can configure various settings related to application deployment.

JDK

Here the directories of the Java Development Kit (JDK) for each supported Java version can be selected. These JDKs are used when you locally deploy an application. Usually, the correct directories are located automatically.

A JDK is necessary to run Mendix applications, because the Mendix Runtime runs on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM).

Deployment

Enable Run Optimizations

Enable this setting to increase the speed at which a running application is updated after changes have been made in Studio Pro. If only pages, layouts, or snippets have been changed, then an entire restart of the application is skipped to decrease deployment time. Also, no Java compilation is performed when no relevant files have changed.

Optimize Bundle

This setting is visible and effective when the React client is enabled. By default, it is already enabled to reduce the size of the generated app bundle and speeds up the bundling process by disabling source maps generation. Source maps are used for debugging the bundled code during development. If you want to generate source maps for debugging pluggable widgets, you can disable this setting.

Build

Generate Full Debug Info

Enabling this option includes debug information about local variables in the Java actions when building them, which aids debugging from Eclipse. Without this option, only line numbers and source information will be included.

Gradle Synchronization

This feature was introduced in Mendix versions 10.16.0, 10.12.7, and 10.6.17.

This option controls the synchronization of managed dependencies. For more information, see the Offline Usage section in Managed Dependencies.

Gradle Directory

A directory where Gradle is located on the computer that you use to deploy the application. The correct directory is usually located automatically.

Use Custom Repositories

Enabling this option allows you to specify which repositories should be used by Gradle. For more information, see the Custom Repositories section in Managed Dependencies.

Repositories

Here you can specify which repositories to use for Gradle. The content of this field should be specified using Groovy syntax and is what is inside the repositories { } section in a Gradle build file. By default, this field contains: mavenCentral().

Maia Tab

In-Editor Recommender

The In-Editor Recommender section contains the following settings:

Enable for microflow, nanoflow, and rule editors – this allows you to enable and disable Logic Recommender in the microflow, nanoflow, and rule editors.
Enable for workflow editor – this allows you to enable and disable Workflow Recommender in the workflow editor.

Best Practice Recommender

The Best Practice Recommender section contains the following settings:

Show recommendation in editors – when enabled, Best Practice Recommender highlights elements that contain anti-patterns in visual editors.
Automatically run an inspection after opening an app – when enabled, Best Practice Recommender automatically runs an inspection when an app is opened. If the app contains errors, the inspection will not run.

Model Tab

This setting defines the default response to the question whether to automatically fill the contents of a data widget. This question is asked, for example, when dragging an Entity onto a Data View widget. When enabled, the pre-selected answer is yes; otherwise, it is no.

Version Control Tab

General

Executable

This is the path and name of the program that is used to view the details of file changes in the commit dialog box.

For example, you can see how to set up file comparison for Visual Studio Code below:

{path to VS Code}/Code.exe --wait --diff "{0}" "{1}"

Argument Pattern

This is the pattern from which the arguments are derived that are passed to the file comparison program. The following two placeholders can be used in this pattern:

{0} – this is replaced with the name of the original file before the arguments are passed to the file comparison program
{1} – this is replaced with the name of the changed file before the arguments are passed to the file comparison program

Solution Warning

Select Show warning on updating marketplace modules to display a warning message when updating a Marketplace module.

Git

Enable Private Version Control with Git

Select this option when you want to work on an app that is not stored in Mendix Team Server, but in a private Git server, which you have access to. This allows you to specify the location of the app on the Git server when opening, downloading, or uploading the app. With this setting you also need to specify name and email that will be used to identify your commits with Git.

Name

Specify your name for Git to use it in commit messages and make them more informative.

Email

Specify your email for Git to use it in commit messages and make them more informative.

Clone

Different clone types are available in Studio Pro version 10.12.0 and above.

Select a Clone type to use for future clone operations, such as downloading an app or checking out another branch of an app you already downloaded. Changing this setting does not affect apps that you have already downloaded.

Combine Local and Remote Changes

This setting was introduced in Mendix version 10.5.

When combining changes, for example when doing a Git pull, the user can choose between Rebase and Merge as the default action. This preference can be overridden for each merge which contains conflicts.

Git Version Warning

Select Do not show warning about Git version to suppress a warning shown when Studio Pro starts.

Background Tasks

Enable Automatic Fetching from a Remote Repository

Select Enable automatic fetching from a remote repository to enable the Automatic fetch mechanism.

Fetch Interval, Minutes

The number of minutes to wait after a fetch has started before performing another fetch. This must be between 1 and 120 minutes.

Enable Automatic Repository Optimization

Select Enable automatic repository optimization to run Git repository optimization automatically on a regular basis. This helps you maintain the storage structure providing benefits from both performance and repository size perspectives.

Number of Commits

This option is available when the Enable automatic repository optimization setting is on. Studio Pro keeps track of the number of commits made in the local repository. You can manually specify the minimum number of commits needed to start the background optimization. For more information, see Git Storage Optimization.

Work Environment Tab

Studio Pro Theme

This option allows user to choose between Studio Pro themes: Auto (System theme), Light, or Dark. The default is Auto (System theme), which detects the theme set in the operating system and uses an appropriate theme for Studio Pro (Light or Dark). Changing this option requires a restart of Studio Pro to take effect.

Default Page Editor

This option sets the default page editor mode that your page opens in: Structure mode (the default) or Design mode. For more information on page editor modes, see the Page Editor Modes section in Page.

Rendering

Hardware and driver issues may cause performance problems when running Studio Pro. These issues can appear in form of dialog boxes opening and closing much more slowly than expected, and general slowness of the UI. In case the hardware problems cannot be solved, it is possible to mitigate these issues by turning the Enable software rendering mode setting on. Enabling this setting requires a restart of Studio Pro to take effect. Running the application with this setting on may increase the CPU usage.

Language

This beta feature is available from Studio Pro 10.17.

This option allows you to change the user interface language you work in while using Studio Pro. At this time, German, English, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean are supported. You must restart Studio Pro in order to use this feature.

Editor Tabs Closing Policy

It is recommended to limit the number of open tabs (open documents) to improve the performance of Studio Pro. This option is enabled by default and set to a limit of 15 tabs. However, you can disable this behavior completely or change the limit value.

The closing policy is not applied to tabs with unsaved changes.

Advanced Tab

Proxy Server

Sometimes the computer running Studio Pro cannot access the internet directly, but has to connect to a proxy server that requires authentication. If this is the case, then these settings can be used to specify the user name and password to connect to the proxy server.

Usage Data

When the Send Studio Pro usage data to Mendix setting is enabled, Studio Pro sends usage data to Mendix that allows Mendix to identify issues and improve the user experience. The usage data does not contain sensitive information. It is possible to disable this feature, but it may affect the behavior of some features, prevent Mendix from identifying issues reported by the user, or affect tracking issues that are not reported yet. This setting is machine-specific and changing this feature does not affect any existing installed version.

Visual Builder for XPath Constraints

In Studio Pro version 10.5, a new, visual, way of constructing XPath constraints was introduced. This is called visual Builder for XPath constraints (Builder).

From Mendix version 10.10, Builder is the default way to construct XPath constraints, but you can change the default by clearing Enable the XPath Builder as the default XPath constraint editor.

For Mendix versions 10.5.0 through 10.9.0, this option is on the New Features tab.

New Features Tab

Access Rules Editor

In Studio Pro version 10.6 a new access rule editor was introduced in Beta. Enable this option to use the new editor in the Access rules tab of the entity properties dialog.

For more information, see Defining Access Rules Using the New Editor section of Access Rules.

Expression Editor

The expression editor is modernized since Studio Pro 10.6. This setting is enabled by default. The editor allows the user to write rich text statements and get instant feedback on their validity. In Studio Pro, it is often used to write an expression for a decision or to write an XPath expression for data filtering.

GraphQL

Publishing data as a GraphQL service is available as of Studio Pro 10.14. When you enable this feature, you can indicate that a published OData service also supports GraphQL.

Maia

Enable Domain Model Generator (Experimental)

In Studio Pro 10.13.0, Domain Model Generator was introduced as an experimental feature. Enable this option to help you generate entities and associations for empty domain models. For more information on how to use this feature, see Domain Model Generator.

Enable Translation Generator (Experimental)

In Studio Pro 10.12.0, Translation Generator was introduced as an experimental feature. Enable this option to help you translate your model to different languages through Batch translate under the Language menu. For more information, see Translation Generator.

Mapping Editor

This setting allows you to set the beta version as the default editor.

System Texts Editor

In Studio Pro 10.14.0, the web version of the system texts editor was released as an experimental feature. Enable this option to use the web version of the editor.

If Translation Generator is also enabled, you can use it in this editor as well. For more information, see the Generating Translation for System Texts section in Translation Generator.

Toolbox

Enable this setting to use the modernized toolbox. This requires restart of Studio Pro.

Upload to Version Control Server