Application development overview

BMC Helix Innovation Suite provides extensive authoring capabilities for applications built for web and Windows environments. Applications developed with BMC Helix Innovation Suite are fully customizable and extensible. You can add your own fields, objects, and templates to any application, whether it is created by you, purchased from BMC, or acquired from a third party.

You can create the following types of applications:

• Deployable applications are designed to be used in multiple server environments. These applications use permissions based on roles defined in the application. When the application is deployed, the administrator maps the roles to groups on the local server. Other features available to deployable applications include the ability to gather statistics about the application and to map the same role to different groups for different application states, such as test or production.
• Local applications use permissions based on groups defined on the local server. Therefore, these applications are usually used on a single server.

BMC has developed a number of applications, including BMC Digital Workplace, BMC Helix Business Workflows, BMC Helix Multi-Cloud Broker,  BMC Helix ITSM: Service Desk, BMC Helix ITSM: Asset Management, BMC Helix ITSM: Change Management, and BMC Service Level Management. These applications are used to track information such as trouble tickets, change requests, asset records, purchase orders, and service level agreements.

Application localization

BMC Helix Innovation Suite provides an internationalized environment for building, testing, and localizing applications.

A locale describes the language, country setting, and other characteristics of the local system's user interface. You can create an BMC Helix Innovation Suite application to run in a particular locale, or you can make your application simultaneously available in multiple locales.

Localize the Digital Service applications to enable your users to view the user interface (UI) and error messages in their preferred language. For more information, see Localizing a Digital Service application. 

The development environment enables you to localize all aspects of the user interface:

• Language used for labels, messages, help text, reports, menus, and any other words that are part of a form's user interface
• Separator symbol for decimal numbers that include a fraction
• Separator symbol for numbers greater than 999
• Format for dates and times
• Layout, colors, and images

You can store each localized version of a form as a view. Therefore, the same application can provide separate user interfaces (views) for British English, Australian English, Mexican Spanish, and Peruvian Spanish. Although the user interface is tailored to each user's locale, the data and workflow are the same for all users. Therefore, you need to agree on the language for the data before the application is made available.

The localization features are automatic for the user and easy to implement for the application builder. To localize an application for a given locale, an administrator can create views only for that locale and add corresponding messages to the message catalog. Utilities are available to assist with this work. See Localizing-an-application-to-other-languages.

The following topics describe the different application development types and their deployment: