Hello, everyone, and welcome to a lightning talk on config-driven UI using ReactJS. In this video, I'll explain what config-driven UI means and how we can do it in ReactJS.
But first, a brief intro about me. So hey, guys, I'm Joban. And I've been working at Microsoft for the past two years. And you guys can reach out to me on the below handles. And so without further ado, let's get started.
So what is config-driven, right? What it means. Config-driven UI is a technique that allows you to create user interfaces based on a configuration file, such as JSON, or a TypeScript file that defines the layout and content of the UI components. This can be useful for creating dynamic and customizable UIs without hard coding them.
For example, let's say you want to create a dashboard that shows different types of data visualizations and summaries. Instead of writing GSX code for each component and arranging them in a fixed layout, you can use a JSON file that specifies the type, size, position, and data source for each component. And then you can create a custom component that reads that JSON file and renders the UI accordingly. So this way you can easily change the UI by modifying the JSON file without even touching the other code. You can also reuse the same component from different pages and all for different scenarios by providing different JSON files.
Moving on, now let's understand this a bit in detail. So here we can see a base UI layer on top of which there is a kind of a wizard menu which consists of various tiles number 1, number 2, number 3, etc. And each tile has a bunch of components A, B, C, etc. The V and the H on the left side you can see, it represents whether the layout setting of each component is whether it is a horizontal or a vertical component. We will come to that what it means.
Now for the tile 2 we can have a very similar UI as tile 1 with slight change in the component layout. You can see here. Similarly for tile number 3 also has minor differences in the UI. Now the idea here is do not create separate files for each tile as the UI differences are very minor, but to have a single config file for all the tiles and we render the tiles on the go by reading the config. So how can we do this in reactjs. There are many ways to implement to be honest this config driven UI paradigm. But in this talk, I will show you one of the possible approaches using react-hook and custom components. The basic idea is to have two parts. One to define the layout which uses a recursive structure to hold vertically and horizontally stacked elements and another to map leaf nodes to the actual content that needs to be displayed. In this talk, we will cover the actual implementation of a smallest unit of component, for example, a drop-down, it can be a form, it can be a chart.
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