Exploring a Project

Once you have a project open – whether through the REPL, a CLI one-liner, or a script file – the next step is to look around. What modules exist? What entities are defined? What does a particular microflow do?

mxcli provides three families of commands for exploration:

• SHOW commands list elements by type. SHOW ENTITIES lists all entities; SHOW MICROFLOWS IN Sales narrows the list to one module.
• DESCRIBE commands display the full MDL source for a single element, giving you the complete definition including attributes, associations, logic, and widget trees.
• SEARCH performs full-text search across every string in the project – captions, messages, expressions, documentation, and more.
• SHOW STRUCTURE gives you a compact tree view of the entire project or a single module, at varying levels of detail.

These commands are read-only. They never modify your project. You can run them freely to build a mental model of the application before making any changes.

What you will learn

In this chapter, you will:

1. List modules, entities, microflows, pages, and other elements with SHOW commands
2. Inspect the full definition of any element with DESCRIBE
3. Find elements by keyword with SEARCH
4. Get a bird’s-eye view of project structure with SHOW STRUCTURE

Prerequisites

You should have mxcli installed and know how to open a project. If not, work through the Setting Up chapter first.

The examples in this chapter assume you have a Mendix project open. You can follow along using either the REPL or CLI one-liners:

# REPL (interactive)
mxcli -p /path/to/app.mpr

# CLI one-liner
mxcli -p /path/to/app.mpr -c "SHOW ENTITIES"

If you do not have a Mendix project handy, the commands will still make sense – the output format and options are the same regardless of the project content.