My inspiration is this: Introduction To Flask-Admin — flask-admin 2.2.0 documentation
If Python can do it, then I can do it too 
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So I’ve made some progress. I can generate automatically the Controllers, the Views and the code to access the resources from the database. The only thing I haven’t solved yet how to handle templates. I’m trying to make this work without generating any files to the disk, but I want users to be able to supply their own templates for maximum customization.
Currently the following code generates a fully fledged admin interface that works with the templates generated by the Mandarin generators (only the templates, no need for views, controllers, etc.). I’m actually re-implementing a demo application with the new system by deleting the files I don’t need as I replace them with macros.
First, the code that creates an admin interface (aptly called Mandarin.Magik, but I’m open to new naming suggestions):
defmodule MandarinOfficeWeb.ExampleAdmin do
alias MandarinOffice.Admin
use Mandarin.Magik,
app_web: MandarinOfficeWeb,
scope: MandarinOfficeWeb.Admin,
repo: MandarinOffice.Repo
add_resource(Admin.Employee)
add_resource(Admin.Department)
add_resource(Admin.Function)
add_resource(Admin.Benefit)
end
Now, the router (the magik part is at the end):
defmodule MandarinOfficeWeb.Router do
use MandarinOfficeWeb, :router
pipeline :browser do
plug :accepts, ["html"]
plug :fetch_session
plug :fetch_flash
plug :protect_from_forgery
plug :put_secure_browser_headers
end
pipeline :api do
plug :accepts, ["json"]
end
scope "/", MandarinOfficeWeb do
pipe_through :browser
get "/", PageController, :index
end
require MandarinOfficeWeb.ExampleAdmin, as: ExampleAdmin
ExampleAdmin.scope "/back_office" do
# You can (and should!) reuse your normal pipelines
# inside the admin interface scope.
pipe_through(:browser)
end
end
The Admin.Employee, Admin.Department, Admin.Function and Admin.Benefit are completely ordinary Ecto modules which Mandarin.Magik introspects to generate the code (plus some small decorations).
I still haven’t published these changes because I’m still not sure on how to solve the template problem (I’ll probably just copy what Phoenix does when searching for the templates, and use the “default templates” if it doesn’t find any. I’ll post a video soon.
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dimitarvp
Not sure I am following you here so apologies if my comment is misguided.
As a guy who worked with a number of non-tech and half-tech people, absolutely do NOT do this. They’ll only see it as “this thing works but it you will not be able to just run a command; you’ll have to get your hands dirty”, at which point they’ll bail.
In other words, don’t put speed bumps on the way.
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tmbb
Hm… I don’t understand. The goal is to be able to write the code above and everything just works.
But if you “outgrow” the default template and want to customize some details, I’d like to allow you to provide different templates. As a completely optional feature.
That way “half-track people” could just write the code above and more “techy people” could ask mandarin to generate template files which you’d customize.
Is it clearer now?
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dimitarvp
Ah, then I misread you. Yes, that’s what I have in mind: have a CMS app generated that works mostly OK without customizations but being able to customize it down the line.
Sorry, my bad for misunderstanding.
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tmbb
Ok, I’ve implemented the “low code” solution as described above and I’m actually very unhappy with it. It’s not customizable and I couldn’t get it to play well with any practical real-world application. I’m back to the generators.
My generators use “feature folders” or “vertical slices”, as discussed here, instead of splitting a “feature” into a controller folder, a view folder and a templates folder. I’ve settled on this architectures because it’s my favorite filesystem layout for “normal” (that is, non-mandarin) phoenix applications. Nonetheless, mandarin plays well with already existing applications which split the controllers, views and templates into their own directories.
I now have a Mandarin.Designer module with is a fancy programmatic interface to the command-line Mandarin and Phoenix generators. It gives you some tools to generate HTML, contexts and schemas in a phoenix app in a proper Elixir program, instead of painstakingly run the generators manually in the command line. I call it the Designer because it’s usefull to design your application’s data layer upfront and then generate it all at once. It is also very useful to generate multiple admin interfaces/CRUD pages for the same project.
Speaking of CRUD pages, I think Mandarin is now very usable for “normal” CRUD pages with fancy features like (multi-)select witgets which support Ecto associations (including many-to-many relations, although those take some manual work to get right). The biggest catch is that you have to be ok with using bootstrap templates. I couldn’t find a way of generating templates that don’t depend heavily on a CSS framework.
I’m quite happy with mandarin and forage right now, and I might relase a v1.0 soon for both packages.
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There are now pre-1.0 releases for:
- Mandarin - the set of generators that builds the admin interface
- Forage - HTML widgets for the admin interface and facilities to create dynmaic ecto queris from query parameters
There is now a mandarin guide that shows how to get basic functionality going: Backoffice Demo — mandarin v0.7.0
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Now I believe I’m getting really close to 1.0. The main new features (already reflected in the GitHub repo) are the following:
-
Updated the generators in order to be more compatible with what Phoenix 1.6 generates
-
Made sure all tests pass (the generators weren’t buggy themselves, but the tests hadn’t been updated to reflect changes in the generators)
-
Use “vertical feature folders” which keep your controllers, views and templates together in the same directory, which makes it easy to modify related parts of the source code
-
As a consequence of the above, there is now a
mix mandarin.uninstall MyContextwhich completely purges all the context diurectories and files and all references to that context from the router. This is very useful when your database design is still in flux and you might want to tear down the whole mandarin files and build them again -
There is now a programatic interface to mandarin generators using the
Mandarin.Designmodule, which allows you to generate the interface for a bunch of schemas from the comfort of an Elixir script instead of having to fiddle with the command line. To keep the design close to the normal Phoenix generators, I’m going to keep the command line interface as the main form of interaction with mandarin, but that might change in a putative 2.0 version -
Mandarin now includes a
mandarin.gen.auth AuthContext User usersmodelled on thephx.gen.authgenerator but with support for “vertical feature folders” and support for prettier forms usingforagewidgets and a boostrap template by default
Things that haven’t changes:
-
Forage is still coupled to bootstrap; that’s pretty much unavoidable for a library of frontend widgets. The widgets must be styled with something, and bootstrap is still one of the easiest frameworks to use and customize, particularly for something like CRUD pages
-
Mandarin still dumps a bunch of files in your application. I’ve decided that mandarin will continue to focus on code generators instead of macros or other use of compile/runtime metaprogramming. No mandarin code runs at runtime.
-
No integration with LiveView. Simple CRUD pages are easy to do with normal controllers + minimal AJAX and more complex CRUD pages are outside of Mandarin’s scope. I’ve had some succes in integrating AlpineJS into mandarin pages (although neither Mandarin nor Forage contain any direct support for it)
The main problems I’ve had in getting to this stage are the fact that Phoenix continues to change the generators (for the better, of course!) on each minor version, and I took som etime to catch up to it. Although my generators are mostly copied from Phoenix, they have some important customizations, so thet job of updating them is not exactly simple. Note that this is not a case of Phoenix changing in backward-incompatible ways; it’s just a case of generators being different.
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Phoenix 1.7 has radically changed the generators again in a way that makes it hard to adapt Mandarin. Maybe I should just quit trying to support the idiomatic project format in new phoenix versions?
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