Feedbacks on the demo

[ouvreboite]

👋 Hey, I'm not an active user, but I've toyed with a lot of backend-as-a-service tools. I like the idea of a declarative file and love that you provide a demo. After looking at it, I've a few feedbacks.

• the demoed use case is too simple to give me an understanding of what manifest can do. I have to look at the doc for that.
  • especially, you don't demo any validation or acces policies/auth or file upload.
  • personally those are the features I'm looking at first when assessing what a Baas can do. And having them in a demo provide a nice way to tie several concept together
• the starting yaml file is a little messy
  • being able to use emoji in entities name is nice, but putting them on every entity give the impression they are mandatory
  • also, why don't the emoji appears in the name of the collection in generated admin UI ❓
  • you use JSON-in-YAML syntax. It's more compact, but for someone unfamiliar with YAML it can be strange
  • you don't leverage YAML comments. You could make the default file way more explicit by doing so.
• no auto-completion / IDE validation
  • i see there is already a JSON Schema available, but the demo use stackblitz which does not support it
  • stackbliz new codeflow IDE does support it, but it cannot open a subfolder of a repo, so you would need to split the demo in it's dedicated repo.

For example, you could have a demo manifest that would look like that, demoing entities, relations, validation, file and policies while using YAML comments to make the manifest self-documented

name: Pokemon app 🐣

entities:

  Trainer: 
    properties:
      # all entities have an id by default
      - name #simple string properties can be just their name
      - name: picture
        type: file
      - name: isChampion 
        type: boolean
    policies: # every one can list trainer, but they can only be created by admin
      read:
        - access: public

  Pokemon 🐉: #feel free to use emojis in your collection names
    properties:
      - name
      - name: level
        type: number
        validation:
          min: 1
          max: 100
      - name: type
        type: choice
        # you can use JSON-in-YAML to keep your config compact
        options: { values: [Fire, Water, Grass, Electric] } 
    belongsTo:
      - Trainer
    policies: # only the trainer can see their pokemons
      read:
        - access: restricted
          allow: Trainer
          condition: self

As for the JSON schema, I created a quick repo with only the demo content (with minor adjustment), and you can see what is looks like on codeflow: https://stackblitz.com/~/github.com/ouvreboite/manifest-demo?file=manifest.yml
It's still not ideal (The YAML extension is not installed automatically and somehow the admin page is not correctly loaded at first), but this allow to have JSON schema based autocompletion in the demo. ⬇️

[brunobuddy]

Hello @ouvreboite

First of thank you for taking some of your time to write a clear feedback. It is very valuable for us as we try to make Manifest onboarding smooth.

Let me answer your suggestions:

• Yes the demo may be to lite. It is basically showing only basic data structure, actually we had a demo per main feature but we are not showing those any more. Do you prefer the one showed in our website https://manifest.build/ ? Same simplicity but more use case oriented

• Yes we can do more with that YAML. The fact that this demo was used in different places make it a bit restricted for some uses

• I did not now about Codeflow for Stackblitz. It seams smoother that the original but as you said there is 2 main problems: we need to install the YAML extension to have auto completion and last but not least the admin panel is not showing by default. It works on selecting a port but for some reason it shows a white screen by default, which is quite annoying

[ouvreboite]

Hi @brunobuddy

The one on manifest.build is quite clean indeed :). I like that it showcases middleware (which I did not know about) and that it sticks to the "long form" of properties declaration to not mix things up.

Maybe this could somehow be extended with some relations for the demo?

• keep as is in the main page of manifest.build (so that it doesn't take too much space)
• propose an extended version for the demo

For example, the demo could be of a "mailing list" app: Contact (as-is) + MailingList (many-to-many with Contact, + a more restrictive permission)