MaxSvargal

MaxSvargal

AshSDUI - Server-Driven UI for Phoenix LiveView applications backed by Ash resources

Hey folks! :waving_hand:

I’d like to introduce AshSDUI, a new library for generating complex interfaces and dynamic layouts directly from declarative Ash resource metadata, powered by Ash and Phoenix LiveView.

I know excellent tools like AshAdmin, Backpex, and Aurora UIX already exist. However, in my experience, they often lack architectural flexibility and clear escape hatches and sometimes excessive boilerplate and low-level handling. I wanted the ability to generate nested forms easily and dynamically alter layouts straight from the database or resource code, based on the actor, tenant, or user role without cluttering templates with conditional logic, and to do so with minimal boilerplate.

With AshSDUI, I’ve focused on creating a highly compact public interface that relies on your existing resource Ash metadata and ready-to-use receipts, but remains fully extensible at any level. It’s designed as an authoring ladder: you can start with fully generated screens and step down to custom recipes or raw LiveView only when needed, all without rewriting the whole stack.

AshSDUI is useful when you want more than scaffolded CRUD, but you still want a declarative path that stays close to your Ash resource model.

  • It separates metadata, view resolution, recipes, and render trees into clear layers.
  • It gives humans and llm agents a smaller authoring surface through standalone UI modules.
  • It keeps generated screens, custom layouts, and live runtime components on one contract.
  • It can grow from generated pages into product UI without forcing a rewrite of the whole stack.

Key highlights:

  • Server-Driven UI (SDUI): Dynamically resolve layouts and component compositions based on context (actor, tenant, audience, etc.) without touching the frontend templates.
  • Metadata-Driven Generation: Seamlessly generate complex UI, handle deep model relationships, and build nested forms right from Ash resource descriptions (ui_field, ui_intent, etc.).
  • Architectural Flexibility: Build ephemeral, code-authored, or database-persisted layout trees with clear escape hatches at every layer.
  • Shared Runtime Contract: Both generated screens and custom SDUI layouts share the exact same underlying contract (view, bindings, state, and context), keeping your data loading and rendering completely consistent.

You can find all the details, tutorials, and deep dives into the runtime/authoring models in the documentation here:

:package: AshSDUI Repository and Readme

:books: AshSDUI Tutorial

I would love to hear your feedback, thoughts, and suggestions! Thanks for your time.

Most Liked

nico_amsterdam

nico_amsterdam

Welcome Max.
You can update your skill set on https://maxsvargal.github.io/ :smiley:

omer

omer

Amazing work! This is exactly what the Ash ecosystem needs right now.

Ash provides absolute superpowers on the backend—handling complex domain logic, relationships, and APIs beautifully. However, the frontend has often remained a bottleneck where we lose that declarative leverage.

The concept of a true Metadata-Driven UI is an absolute game-changer for rapid application development. Having worked extensively with massive ecosystems like Odoo and Frappe, I’ve seen firsthand that their secret weapon is exactly this architecture. By allowing resource metadata to natively dictate dynamic layouts and nested forms, developers can focus entirely on business logic rather than wiring up redundant frontend templates.

Bringing this level of Server-Driven UI to Elixir—combining the declarative nature of Ash with LiveView—is a brilliant move. Your approach with the “authoring ladder” is particularly smart, providing that “batteries-included” experience for generating complex screens quickly while leaving a well-structured escape hatch for custom components.

I’m really looking forward to diving into the repo and seeing how it handles complex, high-concurrency SaaS architectures. Thank you for building and sharing this!

P.S. This really feels like the perfect answer to the previous community explorations regarding the future of Pyro and AshAdmin: https://forum.elixirforum.com/t/an-exploration-of-the-the-future-of-pyro-and-ashadmin/60827

MaxSvargal

MaxSvargal

The ultimate goal is to provide an abstract, declarative architecture that isn’t just for admin dashboards, but is equally suited for public, user-facing interfaces. As you noted with the ‘authoring ladder’, it’s all about hitting that exact sweet spot: delivering the absolute minimum boilerplate out of the box, while allowing for maximum customization on demand.

Thanks for checking it out, and I’d love to hear your thoughts once you dive into the repo!

Where Next?

Popular in Announcing Top

OvermindDL1
I created a new library (rather I pulled out a couple files from my big project), it manages an operating system PID file for the BEAM. ...
New
seancribbs
Today I released a new dialyzer Mix task as the dialyzex package! At the time we started writing this task, the existing dialyzer integra...
New
brainlid
LangChain is short for Language Chain. An LLM, or Large Language Model, is the “Language” part. This library makes it easier for Elixir a...
New
mbuhot
Leverage Open Api 3.0 (Swagger) to document, test, validate and explore your Plug and Phoenix APIs. Generate and serve a JSON Open API ...
New
Qqwy
Hello everyone, I wrote a small library today called MapDiff. It returns a map listing the (smallest amount of) changes to get from map...
New
mindok
What is ContEx? A pure Elixir server-side data plotting/charting library outputting SVG. It has nice barcharts in particular and works g...
New
josevalim
Hello everyone, We have just released NimbleCSV which is a small and fast CSV parsing library for Elixir. It allows developers to define...
New
mplatts
With HEEX released we decided to start a components library using Tailwind CSS - check it out here: Petal Components. We also have a boi...
New
woylie
Flop is an Elixir library that applies filtering, ordering and pagination parameters to your Ecto queries. offset-based pagination with...
New
trisolaran
Hi! :waving_hand: I would like to present LiveSelect, a little library that I wrote to easily add a dynamic selection input to your LV f...
198 10978 107
New

Other popular topics Top

Harrisonl
We have an ECS cluster with 4 services, where each task joins a single cluster, via discovery ECS discovery service. Currently when I de...
New
lastday4you
I wanted to check elixir version in phoenix because i found that my elixir is 1.5 but when i use Enum.chunk_by it said the function is un...
New
Darmani72
If I have a post route which an argument: post /my_post_route/:my_param1, MyController.my_post_handler How would get the post params ...
New
electic
Hi, I am new to Elixir. I am trying to use the DateTime component to insert a date into MySQL however the there seems to be no way to fo...
New
Patoshizzle
After calling mix ecto.create I get this error: 17:00:32.162 [error] GenServer #PID<0.412.0> terminating ** (Postgrex.Error) FATAL...
New
AngeloChecked
What learn first? Rust or Elixir Hi Elixir community! I’m here because i want learn a new language. I’m a junior developer and mainly i ...
New
SoCreat
i’m a new one to elixir which editor can i use vs code? or atom? Thanks! :smiley:
New
nobody
Hi! In PHP: $_SERVER[‘SERVER_ADDR’] - in Elixir? Searched the docs for ip address and the web, no good results. Thanks!
New
dogweather
I wrote this comment on r/haskell, and it’s not popular there. :wink: But I think I’m on to something… Haskell reminds me of Java, and e...
New
vonH
In asking this question I am more interested about the expressiveness of the language itself and less concerned about the availability of...
New

We're in Beta

About us Mission Statement