OutSystems “How To” #1

How to ask for help…

So, you have a question and are thinking about posting it to the OutSystems Forum? Cool! The forum is part of the community and its main purpose is to provide a place where we, OutSystems Developers, can help each other and share knowledge and experience. A question is an opportunity to learn something new, for everybody!

But (there is always a but, right?), before you ask, let’s take a moment to see how one can make a question that will receive answers both straight to the point and in a timely fashion.

Do you really know how to code?

If the answer to this question is “no”, please be warned: the forum is not the right place for you to learn the basics.

As a professor once told me: “For you to make a good question, you must know something about what you’re asking.”

If you’re coding without basic knowledge about programming, you will reach a dead end very fast, and will find hard to get help in the forum. It will be difficulty for you to explain the problem. It will be difficulty for you to understand the answers.

Spend some time learning the basic principles of programming first. This will be very rewarding in the long run.

Did you finish the training?

This is a print screen of the OutSystems Website Learn area.

Here I really need to point out a very important thing. There are so many questions made by nice people that are eager to build cool apps with OutSystems, but in all their excitement they kind of didn’t remember that you need to learn how to use a tool before actually using it.

Yes. Before asking anything in the forum, ask yourself if you already took the OutSystems training. Not yet? So, go take it! You can do a live training or the online training (this one is for free…).

Why? Because a proper training is the fastest way to start making cool apps in OutSystems, as it follows a logical path and is highly optimized. And because people that often help in the forum usually get very frustrated by questions to which the answer is right there, in the training material…

So… No excuses! Take the training!

And what about the documentation?

Oh yeeeessss… OutSystems has lots of documentation for you to explore in moments of need. For learning something new. Or just for the sake of fun. Whatever works best for you.

Here is a very important link that you shouldn’t miss: https://success.outsystems.com/Documentation

The community will be more willing to help when the question shows that some effort is being done to solve the problem, besides the question itself.

Am I the first to ask this question?

While it is possible, chances are the answer to this meta-question is a sounding NO! 😜 Unless your question is about something it is not working in your own logic. And even then…

So, what should you do now?

Use the search functionality. Search everything again, and again, trying different combinations of keywords. If you prefer to use a search engine to do this (like DuckDuckGo, Google, Bing, etc), remember to include the keyword “OutSystems” in the searches.

Learning to search is an important skill for a developer.

And the question is…

When an answer for a problem is not found during the search phase, it’s time for a question in the Forum.

Each question may require a different approach, depending on what is being asked. So, in order to make it easy to understand what would be (possibly) the best approach for a question, let’s group typical questions into three different categories:

a) “It does not work…”. These are questions one asks when there is a code, but it is not working as expected. There are no question more difficult to answer. When facing a problem with your code that you are unable to solve, you need to provide all the most important information in the right way, or it will take a lot of time from the community to just figure it out what’s happening. In the next section (How to ask a question) you will find some best practices when asking a question in the forum you really should follow.

b) “How to…?”. In the OutSystems forum, these questions appear very often. They usually come in two flavours: “How to implement something” (logic) and “How to use something” (most of the time a Forge’s component, or a statement/widget). Usually both are not really difficult to answer, unless it is related to a Forge component. However, you need to show that you are trying (and where you searched for documentation, etc). For this type of question, this is very important.

c) “Could someone explain…?”. Questions like that are usually about the way the platform itself works. Theory, you could say. Usually they are posted when one needs to get to know the “innards” of the platform, because it can have an impact on the application behaviour, and this information was not found anywhere. These questions are hard to answer, because not everybody knows how things work under the hood. It may take longer to get an answer for these questions.

How to ask a question?

If you follow the list presented below when preparing your question, you are on the right path to get a good answer.