Thanks for the quick update. It would be good also to update #10
Add a Function resource: mix mandarin.gen.html Admin Function functions name:string --binary-id
instead of
Add a Function resource: mix mandarin.gen.html Admin Department departments name:string
Hey, when do you estimate that this project will be production ready?
I think there is a bigger demand than we think when it comes to admin generators, especially a standardized one that becomes a default recommendation. This would be positive in many ways, as in several contributors, more knowledge spread around and of course a great product.
I wish I could contribute but I don’t think I have the elixir experience yet to be useful, but I will fork and test the repo when I get home from work and try it out for feedback purposes 
I don’t really have an estimate for when I have the docs done. Mandarin is mostly ready for production use now. You can create an admin backend using the generators and pretty much never touch the code (except to add authentication and authorization to the pipeline and things will work. The problem is that appart from the “tutorial” in the example repo there are no docs.
But even worse is the fact that Forage doesn’t have 100% code coverage yet, and docs are also pretty sparse. There’s also the problem that Forage web doesn’t yet support disjunction (the OR operator) in queries yet, but that’s not very important in my opinion.
Hm… I don’t know if thde demand for admin generators is that big. I think people would prefer an admin framework that worked based on DSLs and macros. Mandarin has been criticised for generating a lot of code, when much of it could be simplified with. The controller could be something like this:
defmodule App.Admin.Employee do
use Mandarin.Controller, resource: App.Admin.Employee
# with defoverridable functions, of course
end
It’s actually much more work to generate a file with the controller code. I’m doing it because I believe it’s easier to customize if all code is explicit (and you’ll want to customize it sooner or later…).
Just trying to get some feedback Has anyone actually tried this admin interface in a user-facing app, even if for an internal app? I’ve been quiet for a long time but I’m thinking on going back to it (I have a project that might use this)
Nope, not yet, never got around it. Was wondering between this one and a few others but I am more open to try some of what they call them today “low-code” or “no-code” internal app builders (of which there’s a lot).
Hm… what is a good example of a “low code” app builder? I’m not very familiar with those.
Here are a few lists:
EDIT: And a HN thread where a number of such tools are shown as well:
Ask HN: Best low-/no-code solution for simple web-based database frontends
I see. My approach is the exact opposite of "no code " tools then. It dumps a lot f code into your project in order for it to be maximally customizable.
But I’ll rise up to the challenge! What if it was possible to do something like this:
defmodule MyAppWeb.BackOffice do
use Mandarin.Magik,
repo: MyApp.Repo
# The modules under the Admin scope are normal ecto schemas
# created inside the Admin context (of course even the Magik version
# of Mandarin uses contexts! We are note barbarians...)
alias MyAppWeb.Admin.{
Employee,
Department,
Function,
Benefit
}
add_resource(Employee)
add_resource(Department,)
add_resource(Function)
add_resource(Benefit)
end
and then add the following to your router.ex file:
require MyAppWeb.BackOffice
scope "/back_office ", MyAppWeb.BackOffice, as: :back_office do
pipe_through([:browser])
MyAppWeb.BackOffice.routes()
end
That would make it similar to many Python admin solutions, which are pretty low code (I believe Rails has some “low code” admin frameworks, but I’m not familiar enough to comment on those).
This is not something Mandarin currently implements, but I’m fairly confident I can implement this and it would be even simpler than the current architecture.
That would actually be great! Very “low-code” indeed and it looks like you can do a lot of stuff happen with it.