What's new in Intent Architect (December 2024)

Welcome to the 2024 Christmas edition of highlights of What's New in Intent Architect.

We are proud to announce the release of Intent Architect 4.4 beta. This release has been largely focused on improving product usability and feature discoverability. This version is fully backwards compatible.

Update details

Help Topics, in product

Intent Architect now includes built-in Help. Pressing F1 within the context of a designer opens the Help dialog. The dialog provides help topics that can be further filtered using the search bar.

Help Topics Sample

The Help dialog is context-aware. For example:

  • Pressing F1 in a designer displays help topics specific to that designer.
  • Selecting an Element such as a domain Class or CQRS Command filters help topics relevant to the selected element.

Available from:

  • Intent Architect 4.4.0

Suggestions

Suggestions are a new feature intended to give context-specific assistance to modelers. When hovering your mouse over an Element that has suggestions, you will see a Light Bulb icon, indicating that suggestions are available.

Suggestions Sample

Suggestions aim to assist with the following:

  • Quickly model common scenarios, for example:
    • Publishing an Integration Event from a CQRS Command.
    • Subscribing to an Integration Event.
    • Publishing a Domain Event from a domain behavior.
  • Add related Elements/Associations for existing Diagram Elements.
  • Discover modeling options.

Available from:

  • Intent Architect 4.4.0

Search Everywhere

The Search Everywhere dialog allows you to quickly find aspects of your design using a unified, incremental search box that also supports abbreviation matching.
The search is performed across applications, and the search results provide full context to make it easy to identify the desired result.

Search Everywhere Sample

You can access the Search Everywhere dialog using its shortcut (Ctrl+T).

Available from:

  • Intent Architect 4.4.0

SonarQube module

This module installs the SonarQube IDE linter into your application, providing real-time code quality analysis and feedback on the quality, readability, and complexity of the code.

An example of some warnings raised by SonarQube (as well as other analysis tools):

SonarQube warning

Available from:

  • Intent.SonarQube 1.0.0

Azure Functions upgradeable to Isolated Processes for .NET 8

Azure Functions for Isolated Processes are now accessible by configuring your API project to target .NET 8 and setting the Output Type to Console in the Visual Studio designer.

To learn about migrating existing Azure Functions from .NET 6 In-Process to .NET 8 Isolated Processes, click here.

Available from:

  • Intent.AzureFunctions 5.0.1

Find Usages

The Find Usages (Shift+F12) feature has been vastly improved, leveraging the new Search Everywhere feature.

Find Usages Sample

Find usages will present you with a list of all references to the modeled element, including across applications.

Example use cases for this feature:

  • Who is subscribing to this Integration Event?
  • What would be affected if I change this domain attribute?

Available from:

  • Intent Architect 4.4.0

Filtered searching

When searching in the Solution Explorer and designer tree-view, these trees now filter to only show matching search results.

Filtered Search Sample

Available from:

  • Intent Architect 4.4.0

Add to Diagram

Diagrams in the Service Designer and Domain Designer have a new feature, Add to Diagram (Ctrl+Shift+A), which assists with finding and adding items onto the diagram.

Add to Diagram Sample

The dialog will show you all elements, which aren't currently on your diagram, which you can add to it. This list includes elements in the current package as well as referenced packages.

Common use cases for this feature:

  • Adding elements to model against like:
    • Integration Messages, for Integration Subscriptions.
    • Entities, for CRUD implementations.
    • Domain Services, for modeling Service Operation Calls.
    • Domain Events, for Domain Event subscriptions.
  • Adding Custom Commands/Queries to an existing Diagram.
  • Creating custom Diagrams.

Available from:

  • Intent Architect 4.4.0
  • Intent.Modelers.Domain 3.12.0-beta.*
  • Intent.Modelers.Services 3.9.0-beta.*

Solution folders

You can now group applications together by adding folders to the solution explorer. This is particularly useful if you have:

  • Many Microservices.
  • Logically similar applications you'd like to group together.

Solution explorer folders

Available from:

  • Intent Architect 4.4.0

.NET 9 support

We have added full support for .NET 9. When creating applications you can configure to target .NET 9 and all of our modules have been updated to resolve the latest NuGet packages for your targeted .NET Framework.

The current default for new applications is .NET 8 as it is the latest LTS.

AutoMapper ProjectTo option for CRUD patterns

There is now an option to have your CRUD data queries realized using AutoMapper's ProjectTo feature. There is a new application setting under "Domain Interaction Settings" called "Default Query Implementation" which has the following options:

  • Default, the current CRUD implementation.
  • Project To, CRUD queries with be implemented using ProjectTo.

Here is an example of Query implementation using the ProjectTo option.

public async Task<List<CustomerDto>> Handle(GetCustomersQuery request, CancellationToken cancellationToken)
{
    var customers = await _customerRepository.FindAllProjectToAsync<CustomerDto>(cancellationToken);
    return customers;
}

Available from:

  • Intent.Application.AutoMapper 5.1.6
  • Intent.Modelers.Services.DomainInteractions 2.0.3
  • Intent.Application.MediatR.CRUD 6.0.22
  • Intent.Application.ServiceImplementations.Conventions.CRUD 5.0.19

Finbuckle multi-tenancy support for MongoDB

If you install the Intent.Modules.AspNetCore.MultiTenancy module with the MongoDB module, you can now configure what type of Multi-tenancy you want to use. You can set the MongoDB Data Isolation to the following options:

  • Separate Database, each tenant will connect to their own database.
  • None, disable multi-tenancy.

See the module documentation for more details.

Available from:

  • Intent.MongoDb 1.0.18
  • Intent.Modules.AspNetCore.MultiTenancy 5.1.5

Finbuckle multi-tenancy support for Google Cloud Storage

If you install the Intent.Modules.AspNetCore.MultiTenancy module with the Google Cloud Storage module, you can now configure what type of Multi-tenancy you want to use. You can set the Google Cloud Storage Data Isolation to the following options:

  • Separate Storage Account, each tenant will connect to their own storage account.
  • None, disable multi-tenancy.

See the module documentation for more details.

Available from:

  • Intent.Google.CloudStorage 1.0.0-beta.4
  • Intent.Modules.AspNetCore.MultiTenancy 5.1.5

Service Designer authorization improvements

Various improvements have been made around defining authorization within the services designer.

The Secured, Unsecured stereotypes and security related designer settings have been moved from the Intent.Metadata.WebApi module to a new Intent.Metadata.Security module. This new module will automatically be installed on updating to the latest version Intent.Metadata.WebApi.

This has allowed us to remove the separate Authorize stereotype for CQRS operations as it was previously impossible to use the existing Secured and Unsecured stereotypes without adding a dependency to Intent.Metadata.WebApi. Any existing Authorize stereotypes applied will be automatically converted to Secured stereotypes.

Apply multiple Secured stereotypes

It is now possible to apply multiple Secured stereotypes to Services, Operations, Commands and Queries. When multiple Secured stereotypes are applied they are treated as all needing to have their security requirements fulfilled while for a specific Secured stereotype if there are multiple policies or roles applied, only a single one of them has to be fulfilled. Overall this gives more flexibility in representing certain security requirements.

Apply the Secured to a Service package

It is now possible to apply Secured or Unsecured stereotypes to a Services package within the Services package which will apply security requirements (such as policies and/or roles) to all Service Operations, Commands or Queries within that package.

Available from:

  • Intent.Application.MediatR 4.3.0
  • Intent.Application.MediatR.Behaviours 4.3.0
  • Intent.AspNetCore.Controllers 7.0.0
  • Intent.AspNetCore.Controllers.Dispatch.MediatR 6.0.0
  • Intent.HotChocolate.GraphQL 5.0.0
  • Intent.HotChocolate.GraphQL.AspNetCore 6.0.0
  • Intent.HotChocolate.GraphQL.AzureFunctions 2.0.0
  • Intent.HotChocolate.GraphQL.Dispatch.MediatR 2.0.0
  • Intent.HotChocolate.GraphQL.Dispatch.Services 2.0.0
  • Intent.Metadata.WebApi 4.6.4
  • Intent.Metadata.Security Intent.Metadata.Security 1.0.0

ASP.NET Core MVC module

View stubs and basic MVC controllers can now be generated for, and which dispatch to, Services in the Service designer.

To get started with the module simply right-click a Service in the Services Designer and select the Expose with MVC option:

Expose with MVC menu option

Once exposed, various settings can be configured for particular operations:

Example of MVC settings

Example of MVC settings

See the README for more information.

Available from:

  • Intent.AspNetCore.Mvc 1.0.0-beta.2

Multi-tenancy Route Strategy

When configuring multi-tenancy settings, Route is now as strategy option, as well as the parameter name to use as the tenant:

Route strategy Route parameter

The route parameter specified can then be used as a valid placeholder when defining an HTTP route:

Route parameter

Available from:

  • Intent.Modules.AspNetCore.MultiTenancy 5.1.5

Custom Swagger examples

An OpenAPI Settings stereotype is now available to manually be applied to DTO Fields and parameters.

The value entered for Example Value will reflect in the OpenAPI specification and on the Swagger UI.

Example value

Available from:

  • Intent.Modules.Metadata.WebApi - 4.6.4
  • Intent.Application.Dtos - 4.4.3
  • Intent.Application.MediatR - 4.3.0
  • Intent.AspNetCore.Controllers - 7.0.0
  • Intent.AspNetCore.Controllers.Dispatch.MediatR - 6.0.0