Application Framework

A more than real catch-22 situation for large business suites: Customers need continuous adjustments to the standard product to meet their individual requirements. However, they also want continuous development of the base system, which is often very difficult to reconcile with individual extensions. While many manufacturers rely on monolithic architectures and outsource the issue of individualization and upgradeability to (typically expensive) integrators, MD-Premium takes a completely different road here.

The central question is: How must a system be designed in order to enable any kind of adaptation and expansion on the one hand, and to ensure that these individualizations can follow the evolutionary path of the base software without constantly raising additional implementation and adaptation costs on the other. The answer that Multidata's engineers have found to this question is: Application Framework

At its heart, MD-Premium is not an ERP, nor is it a CRM or HRM. At its core, MD-Premium is a powerful runtime environment for business logic of all kinds, and the individual function modules of our Enterprise Business Suite are extensions of this platform themselves. This means that these functionalities are not exclusive, they can be adapted, expanded or completely replaced by other function packages at any time. Design your business software the way you need it.

A strict separation between business logic and user interface, as well as clear guidelines and mechanisms for the implementation of individual extensions, ensure the greatest possible sustainability and future-proofing of your applications. Once implemented, customizations easily outlast the different upgrade cycles of the base software and continue to do their job even years after initial implementation.

Levels of flexibility

A basic building block of the unrivalled flexibility of MD-Premium is the clear structuring of the system and the division into levels or areas of . The business logic is stored exclusively on the database server, in the form of PL/SQL Scripts, never on the client itself.

Next to the level of the business logic is the so-called metadata level, a pure description level based on XML resources. It defines how the client has to behave, what the menu structures look like, the individual editing masks, which commands are called with which parameters and how the results are displayed. In the end, this means that a client needs to know absolutely nothing about the business logic, only how to interpret the metadata.

The implications of this approach cannot be overstated. Adjustments are primarily made at the database level. As long as you prepare the metadata appropriately, the client will know what to do. This will save you laborious client updates when making an functional adjustment or add a custom feature to the system.

In addition, the client is interchangeable. MD-Premium's in-house Windows client speaks directly to the database. However, you can use the REST API of the Webservice Application Framework (WSA) to connect any other client software to the system, be it an app, a web client or a native application that supports the REST protocol. The client only needs to understand how to interpret the metadata in order to gain access to and present the business logic of MD-Premium.

Erweiterbarkeit ohne Grenzen

Virtually no one uses business software out-of-the-box. Adaptations to the individual needs and processes of the respective customer are part for the course, although the extent of these adjustments can vary greatly. It is not uncommon for customers to demand completely new functions and behaviors of the software, which are not provided by the base system at all.

MD-Premium supports every conceivable expansion scenario and, depending on the use case, offers different options for expanding the system with individual functionality.

Even at the metadata level alone, you can make profound adjustments to the system, be it adaptions to the structure of the client or, to a certain extent, the behavior of the system. The entry barrier to work with metadata is relatively low and the handling can be learned quickly even for people with little technical experience.

Customers often want to adapt certain business logic functionalities to the specific characteristics of their respective processes. In this case, the application framework provides clearly defined extension points that are called before and after a function is executed. You can store your individual function code there, which influences the behavior of the function and subsequently overrides its result and supplements it with your own aspects. These extensions can not only be made to the code, they can also be applied to the data models in the database.

However, the supreme discipline is the creation of completely new functionalities. It is irrelevant whether you want to extend existing function modules with new features, design a completely new module or – in extreme cases – discard the entire business logic that can be provided by MD-Premium and develop something entirely new and independent. All you have to do is store the corresponding functionality in the database layer, create the metadata for it, and the client will know how to handle the new functionality.

It should be emphasized that all these scenarios can be implemented by customers themselves. Provided you have the necessary expertise, you have complete freedom in how you wish to expand your Business Suite.

If you have recognized the added value of flexible expandability in business software and would like to take advantage of it, then you have come to the right place.

Here to stay

Even rigid, monolithic systems can be adapted to customer requirements at least to a certain extent. This is usually carried out by integrators at great expense in terms of time and capital.

The real test, however, is the longevity of these extensions over time. Can these extensions still be used after the base system has been upgraded? All too often, the answer is no. This presents many customers with a difficult choice. Either they stick with the current version of the software and miss out on valuable functionality and security upgrades. Or they hire an integrator to adapt the customizations to the new software version. Which usually comes with corresponding costs.

With MD-Premium, you don't have to make this choice. Provided you adhere to the guidelines on how extensions must be placed in the system, your customizations are optimally protected against changes associated with upgrades. This gives you a double benefit. The customizations to the software, in which you have usually invested a lot of time and thought, and which represent the greatest added value of the entire system, will remain yours for many years to come and can be used without restriction. And you still get to enjoy new features and possibilities that result from the further development of the base software itself.

Future-proofing and investment security are key considerations when choosing suitable business software. And MD-Premium is the right choice.

Mit dem richtigen Werkzeug

Many adjustments in MD Premium are made at the metadata level, i.e. in the extensive XML resources that control the structure and behaviour of the clients.

To enable you to work comfortably with this data, MD-Premium provides a powerful editor – the Repository Explorer – which you can use to search and edit the XML structures.

The editor uses the concept of inheritance. To extend a specific resource, you create a child resource that implicitly inherits all the properties of the parent resource. You then simply add the extensions to the child resource and leave the parent resource untouched.

This has decisive advantages: inheriting properties saves you a lot of implementation effort. The original resource is protected and can be accessed resp. fallen back to if necessary. And if the parent resource is modified during an upgrade, your changes remain unaffected and you still have the new properties of the parent resource immediately available.

A built-in checkout mechanism ensures that changes to metadata are not made unintentionally.

Other Features

Workflows

Combine complex work processes spread across numerous screens and data tables into a clearly defined workflow with its own input screen and temporary data storage. Freely definable and applicable at any point in the system.

Reporting

MD-Premium comes with a wide range of standard reports. These can be customized or new ones created from scratch. Two different reporting systems are available for this purpose: XtraReports and Crystal Reports.

Multilingual

MD-Premium supports multilingualism across the entire system. Thanks to Unicode support, non-Latin character sets such as Cyrillic, Farsi or various Asian character sets are also included.

User-Management

System-wide user management with extremely fine-grained rights management allows explicit access control to every resource, editing mask and data table. Utilizes user groups for convenient assignment of access rights

Import/Export

Powerful import/export mechanism for retrieving data from different sources and outputting it in different formats, including Excel and Word (form letter). Scheduler for performing exports on a regular basis.

Document management

Generic document storage for attaching file documents to any database resource. Optionally also available with revision and versioning process for more sensitive documents.

Clients

Setup of multiple database instances for different organizations (branches, countries, etc.). Flexible and freely definable synchronization jobs between clients, as well as the option to define a master database.

Queries & Research

SQL query editor for creating complex filters for a specific data view. Queries can be saved and shared with other users. Multiple queries can be combined into a research.