Mendix Data Hub as a Catalyst for Integrating Your Business Data
By: Samet Kaya
Tags: Low Code, Tips, Mendix, Integration, Datahub

Mendix Data Hub as a Catalyst for Integrating Your Business Data Samet Kaya Follow Jun 1 · 6 min read

Share your data effortlessly with Data Hub

Since the announcement of Mendix Data Hub, Mendix has made it a lot easier to share data between your Mendix apps. Although the first version only supports reading data, this already is a major step in sharing data on a much easier way in your Mendix landscape than we are used to. That said, the benefits of the current feature set only apply to integration between Mendix apps. Integrating with other external systems is quick and easy if there is OData support.

Before we dive into the details, it’s good to mention that other Mendix partners have published articles on the Mendix Data Hub. There is the official Mendix Data Hub documentation and Mendix also developed a learning path to give you a quick start in understanding how to work with Data Hub. But Mendix is, of course, not alone in this area. There are more Data Hubs on the market and Gartner named ‘Digital Integration Hubs’ as the next big thing. If you want to know a little more about that, I recommend this article.

Now, let’s focus on Mendix Data Hub. Mendix Data Hub distinguishes itself from others by tailoring the user experience specifically for Mendix developers. There is a native integration with Studio Pro, Mendix detects automatically published services within your Mendix applications, and it gives you a nice overview in the Data Catalog. Especially when you have many Mendix applications in your organization, the Data Catalog can be beneficial for your DevOps team to find the right data for their business needs. Because of the required extra commercial license, a thorough business case is needed.

The two main limitations

Obviously, Mendix has a long roadmap for Data Hub. With the current product features, there are two main limitations:

1. You can only read data; writing data back is not supported yet. At least not the easy way. You need to fall back on traditional integration methods within Mendix.

2. Only OData is supported for external systems, making it hard to govern all your non-Mendix apps and systems. Except for Mendix, Siemens (Teamcenter and Mindsphere) and SAP products already support OData, you can only easily integrate with an external system if there is OData support.

While the Mendix community is waiting for the next set of product features to make it a more complete product, there are a few use cases where Data Hub really makes a difference in terms of development speed and governance.

Searching and using data on the fly

In a micro-services architecture with mainly Mendix apps, organizations can really benefit from the ease of Data Hub. It’s a common practice to retrieve data on-demand when you need it and use it in your functional process. For instance, you want to use business data, like an address or customer information, which is managed in another app and is the single source. You could call a REST service or use your middleware layer to fetch this data, but you would still need to build a couple of REST services in Studio Pro.

Everyone who develops in Mendix knows how easy it is to do this, but it will still take some time. You will need the help of other people and have some dependencies, and of course: with every integration there is always a catch.

This is where the magic of the purple entities come in; these are called ‘External Entities’. When the Catalog assets are used from the Data Hub pane in Studio Pro, dragging and dropping is enough to add data from another external app to your own app. A consume action is automatically generated, and little authentication configuration is needed. You can directly start building pages and microflows on these magic purple entities. No need to worry about paging, sorting, and retrieving the data. In just a few minutes, you have a working integration and in this example you can easily use the address or customer information in your Mendix app, without the need for replicating the data or building a specific REST service.

Getting an overview of connected apps in a landscape

Another helpful feature is that Mendix automatically detects and administers which Mendix applications are using which Catalog assets. This is presented in a nice graphical feature called the Data Hub Landscape. From the Mendix documentation:

The Data Hub Landscape presents a graphical view of the registered OData services in your Data Hub. It provides a landscape visualization of items registered in the Data Hub Catalog and their relationships with apps that consume the datasets that they connect to.

So it gives an overview, together with nice visuals. With a graph-like presentation layer, Mendix made it really look nice and helpful. Giving a generated and automated overview of your integration landscape is something common for integration and middleware products, but in Mendix landscapes with many apps this was not possible until now.

In a real-life practice with hundreds of services, giving a clear overview will still be difficult and messy. But still, the landscape view is a great help to see which versions of which services are used where. Knowing this as a Mendix developer operating in a large ecosystem is already very valuable, because you will be informed of:

1. Relationships and dependencies between apps

2. Interconnection between datasets

3. Multiple versions of datasets used in apps

4. The context of the data

Connecting the outside world

What if you need to integrate with systems and applications with no OData support? Mendix works with partners providing additional services on top of Mendix Data Hub. The strategic partners of Mendix, Siemens and SAP, have both tightly integrated services with Data Hub — Siemens with the MindSphere platform, bringing the business intelligence of IOT assets to the Datahub and SAP with out-of-the-box OData services for a wide variety of SAP solutions. Next to the strategic partners, there are also technology partners like iPaaS platforms bringing their capabilities to Data Hub.

Enterprise iPaaS eMagiz, as a launching partner, delivers extra features fueling Mendix Data Hub’ capabilities. Registering services and integrations from eMagiz iPaaS is easy with a ‘publish to Data Hub’ feature from your eMagiz catalog.

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