In this blog post, we are going to see how you can extend the capabilities of AgilePoint NX platform. Every client environment is different and it is not a case of one size fits all. For a low-code product to be considered enterprise grade, it needs to have a solid platform architecture which is highly extensible so that the clients who get on to this platform do not hit a roadblock and the product gels in well with rest of their architecture.
Just providing robust out of the box features is not enough and client teams eventually look for extension points. AgilePoint NX provides a highly extensible platform with extension layers which can be used by both business as well as developers. Think of AgilePoint NX as a robust platform rather than just out of the feature set.
There are around 9 extension points which we will go through in the video but here is the high level overview
Form Level Extension: AgilePoint NX forms are purely HTML5 and JQuery based hence there is no need to learn any proprietary scripting language. We provide a JavaScript and CSS injector for those advanced developers who wish to take control of the form.
Process Level Extension: AgilePoint NX process builder provides integration with 70+ LOB systems with around 700+ workflow activities but we realize that it is impossible to cover all possible integrations out there. Keeping that in mind, we provide a SDK using which you can create custom workflow activities which can be exposed at the business layer and reused across multiple applications. This is available in private cloud and On-Premises version only.
Data Layer Extension: Using AgilePoint Data Entity module, business users can create highly secured data model using standard browser interface instead of needing to use SQL queries or tools like SQL Server Management Studio. These entities are protected by enterprise grade security and support complex structures like master-detail relationship.
Portal Extension: Page Builder module lets clients create custom pages for various departments and also override the default home page of the portal to give portal a look and feel similar to your existing intranet. You can even have your own custom portal and page level menu bar.
Custom Branded Mobile Apps: AgilePoint NX Mobile App Accelerator includes a low-code app development platform that enables people to create native enterprise mobile applications for iOS, Android or Windows devices without writing any code. They can then deliver their apps to business users within matter of few minutes. You no longer have to tell business users that you would have to code this or hire developer to build the app.
API Level Extension: Often times clients would have existing ASP.Net, JSP, legacy Winform, WPF etc. apps which they wish to workflow enable. Everything you see on AgilePoint portal UI is using our own API which is exposed to client’s own apps as well so you can create completely custom integration with AgilePoint NX to workflow enable your existing apps. We support both REST as well as SOAP API’s and interface is swagger enabled as well for ease of testing.
Work Center Extension: Often times, business application owners want to have a customized dashboard created for their end users where they can include application context data. The AgilePoint NX dashboard has an extension mechanism where you can include custom columns and tabs of your own and even alter behavior of existing tabs or even hide them completely. This is a premium feature and is available as a add-on option through professional services for a one time fee and once enabled you can use it to create multiple tabs and expose custom columns as per your needs. This is covered in one of my previous blog posts. This is available in private cloud and On-Premises version only.
Custom columns and tabs in AgilePoint NX Work Center – General Availability
Server Level Extension: Entire AgilePoint engine uses a publisher – subscriber mechanism and for every action that takes place on AgilePoint engine, an event is raised which can be subscribed to using a component called AgileConnector. Using this, you can override engine’s OOTB behavior for things like exception handling, task routing etc. This is a very powerful component which lets you make AgilePoint server work precisely in the way you want without hitting roadblock. A lot of OOTB connectors are written using this module. This is available in private cloud and On-Premises version only.
Bring Your Own Portal: This is without doubt one of the most unique and sought after feature of AgilePoint NX. A lot of clients who decide to adopt a low code platform are often faced with a dilemma where they have a lot of existing investment in code based apps and are not expecting to throw that away overnight. A lot of investment has been usually put in their own home grown web portals or 3rd party portals which they have been using for a while and suddenly asking them to retrain their users to go to a new portal to access tasks and forms will be a big hassle for them. AgilePoint NX has a very comprehensive solution for this. Infact this is not something new. AgilePoint NX Dashboard and Forms had been rendering inside of SharePoint and Office 365 for a while. We have just extended this feature now to be available for all web portals which allow custom JS and HTML pages to be added so as long as a portal can host custom HTML and JS files, it is a good candidate to embed AgilePoint functionality in that portal. Please refer to my other blog post for more details on this topic.
Natively Embed AgilePoint NX End User Components in Third Party Web Portals
So as you can see, AgilePoint NX platform provides you various extension points and hence clients can adopt it for creating much more apps than any other low code platform. Here is a video which covers all these topics in more detail.