create-your-first-microflow-hello-world.md

title	category	tags
Create Your First Microflow: Hello World!	Logic & Business Rules

1 Introduction

Mendix uses visual models called microflows to define the logic of your application. Microflows are visual ways of expressing what traditionally would be written in code. This how-to explains how you can create a very simple "Hello World" microflow.

This how-to will teach you how to do the following:

• Create a menu item
• Create and edit a microflow

2 Creating a Menu Item

Microflows can be triggered in many different ways (for details, see Trigger Logic Using Microflows). For this how-to, you'll be using a menu item to trigger the new microflow.

To create a menu item, follow these steps:

1. Open the Navigation editor, add a menu item in the desktop navigation settings, and enter the caption of Hello World:
2. Click Select... in the Target section of the New Menu Item dialog box to open the Select Navigation Target pop-up window:
3. Select a module and click New:
4. Click Create a microflow to connect a new microflow to this menu item.
5. Name the new microflow HelloWorld.
6. Save the new menu item by clicking OK.

3 Editing the New Microflow

To edit the new microflow, follow these steps:

1. Open the new microflow by right-clicking the navigation item created in 2 Creating a Menu Item and select Go to target from the context menu:

   You will see an empty microflow like this:

2. Open the Toolbox in the bottom-right corner of the Modeler: You can also open the Toolbox from the View menu:

3. Drag a Show message action from the Toolbox to the line between the green start even and red end event, which will insert a show message action activity:

4. Double-click the message activity to open the Show Message properties editor.

5. Enter Hello World for the Template value and click OK:

6. Run the application locally and click View App to see the application in your default browser:

7. Locate the new navigation item in the menu bar and click it to see the message.

4 Read More

• How to Define Access Rules Using XPath
• How to Trigger Logic Using Microflows
• How to Create a Custom Save Button
• How to Extend Your Application with Custom Java
• How to Work with Lists in a Microflow
• How to Optimize the Retrieve Activities
• How to Configure Error Handling
• How to Optimize Microflow Aggregates
• How to Extract and Use Sub-Microflows