IDempiere workshop 2026

Brainstorming

At the beginning of the workshop we did a brainstorming about things to talk about in the workshop.

AI:

• AI for users
• Security
• Guardrails
• Skills/MCP for documentation

Howto

• write documentation (with ai)
• write unit tests
• monitor state of sql queries, processes, database
• load tests
• fitnesse/playwright (zk fixed ids?)

UI

• integrate zk into iDempiere
• better theme support
• Marble theme
• free new components
• Murilo’s improvements to his UI

BI

• semantic layer for reporting
• HTML support in a PrintFormat (Murilo advises his FreeMarker solution for that)
• Pivot print persists
• XLS export as numbers (instead of formula)
• internal/external MCP

functional

• MFG II manufacturing - capacity planning
• iDempiere as a framework
• close orders/documents as a process or in a info window
• plugin versus core

marketing

• iDempiere fast track - demystification Crispians blog post
• product versus project

work

UI

What do we need to do to implement marble or other themes?

Carlos: We mixed css inside java. Murilo has done work in this area. Norbert wants to define ui in json. He has an example where he uses badges or other zk view components. We discussed if there is a way and if it is useful to mix the application and and json. What Carlos takes out is that he wants a field not shown as one of our fixed components (e.g. a number as a text field) but in another way (as a progress bar or so). Thomas example of the cards in his logistics board is similiar and already can be done using the html field. For Norberts case we want a json typ field attached to a json schema (IDEMPIERE-6059).

Norbert also likes to improve the tag (label) functionality. tags are not shown in the normal data window. Carlos said the same is true for PostIts.

Carlos says the first step is to enable to use themes (css). (IDEMPIERE-7105) clean up the code. Norbert thinks that can be automated by ai.

Second step is: How can we enable easily layout changes in the UI. (zul) (IDEMPIERE-xxxx)

Try to cover the components zk gives us.

Mohamed asked what is the goal of this work - the goal is to empower users in a ux group to have the flexibility to change the ui and ux as they like.

Murilo did a demonstration of the UI/UX of an implementation he did. Most of his work was done as forms and so can not be used for all windows or for community but it showed nicely what is possible.

He also showed his plugin for freemarker templates. It is an easy way to create very nice reports in html and pdf.

(btw... Thomas did something similar using JasperReports but what Murilo did seems more matured and at the end more powerful. If you prefer to work with JapserReports to be able to edit the reports in Jasper Studio you can have a look at it.)

He also showed a nice workflow to create freemarker forms using ai. Murilo wanted to add an ai interface later to do that automatically. Markus Bozem said we need an plugin to provide an ai interface. (IDEMPIERE-xxxx)

Mahmuda (from Sysnova) started a discussion to create an UI/UX user group and a mattermost channel for it. She wants to lead this group. NOTE: Carlos suggests to add a mattermost channel -> https://mattermost.idempiere.org/idempiere/channels/uiux

small issues before the break

We talked about some small things from the list:

manufacturing

• Manufacturing: Deepak, Zuri, Peter had a kind of group to be in charge of libero manufacturing. They have to create one single joined version and make it compatible with vanilla iDempiere. Mahmuda wants to join this group. NOTE: Carlos suggests to add a mattermost channel -> https://mattermost.idempiere.org/idempiere/channels/mfg

POS group

• an POS group can be build seperately because in this workshop most people are not interested in this theme. NOTE: Carlos suggests to add a mattermost channel -> https://mattermost.idempiere.org/idempiere/channels/pos

AI

Hengsin asked to enable developers to use Vibe Coding to create code. We discussed about the definition of vibe coding.

Hengsin builded a small number of developer skills in the past. https://github.com/hengsin/idempiere-skills

Markus Bozem wants to create skills and write all informations about idempiere conventions in coding. Norbert added that we need also mcp files that may be based on skills.

For example an skill that creates a new column can get a description to look into the database to identify patterns to create new columns.

Mahmuda did a picture to show us a possible layaered approach to get skills.

• An MCP Layer
• idempiere core knowlwedge
• Vibe Coding Chats, including user skills
• a human in the loop
• published

inbetween each layer we need security.

Murilo talked about someone who uses a separate webservice to access iDempiere through rest interfaces that uses like skills.

Mahmuda explains how generic AI and agentic AI can work here. The agenticv AI get information from *.md files, RAG (rules, knowledge database) and a data repository. You can have several LLMs using that like hiring employees. Then you need an "HR-UI" that gives guard rails to the agents and looks over them.

We should care to see where we need an mcp and where skills.

We do need a common repository with skills and mcps.

Carlos wanted to talk about migration scripts. They are very hard to review. An idea is if coderabbit can summarize the migration scripts to help.

We also have to analyze 2packs. We havo to know what to check in the 2Pack and in the SQL. (E.g. validations that lead to a password table or such.)

We have to think how an mcp takes centralized ids. Norbert proposed to have a dry-run before you really take the ids for your public code.

centralized IDs / 2Pack

Thomas asked why we do not use 2Pack instead of migration scripts. Carlos wants to talk about that in the friday meeting with Hengsin and Deepak.

Do we want to stop using centralized ids. Hengsin said on matterpost that it may be possible to use uuids in a 2pack to not need centralized ids any more. That needs a ticket to analyze (IDEMPIERE-xxxx)

We may change from 2Pack in *.xml to *.yaml. Care about PostgreSQL/Oracle code. (IDEMPIERE-xxxx)

Nicolas says that we have to implement a test to assure that when we change 2Pack that it works in all old versions of iDempiere.

UI again: json defined

Murilo showed a PoC to use JSON files and a predefined UI definition to automatically create new fields and new UI elements in an iDempiere window. As it is based on json it is very flexible. That was very niced and showed interesting ideas.

Carlos said this may replace the Attribute Set Editor.

We had concerns about performance. Deepak has concerned about search and reports. Carlos says he has concerns about rest filters (they als do not use json fields). json fields have to be searchable because users expect that.

Carlos says that we can use Attribut Set Instance to implement that. That is another approach.

Nicolas talked about where the definitions can be and if they can be overridden. If the schema is defined in column we can override it in field and in customization. We can have a table to define the schemas. We may create schemas based on context. We can create a detail table for this data. (IDEMPIERE-xxxx)