Design Web UI Backend

[fkromer]

This discussion thread shall clarify the software design for the feature #563 (comment) .

As most developers interested in requirement management will have a strong background in Python (usually as their main second programming language) I would use Python for the backend. As strictdoc is implemented in Python this eases deployment of the backend in the development context (running the backend framework in development mode). In addition the backend could be extended for deployment as standalone docker container.

As backend framework I‘d suggest FastAPI. It is lightweight as Flask but profits from pydantic w.r.t. code reliability. Using Django would be overkill.

For the frontend integration part I‘d suggest GraphQL. It allows to define a typed interface and leads to less boilerplate in comparison to REST. A framework resulting in little code is Strawberry. In case it would be limited w.r.t. features one would have to migrate to Ariadne or Graphene.

W.r.t. the data source integration part it‘s probably best to consider reqif files as single source of truth and read/write from it using reqif. This implies the need for converting between reqif file and sdoc file before reading and after editing data with the backend. However reqif seems to be the only standardized requirement interchange format. In addition this allows a complete decoupling of strictdoc core functionality and the web UI backend.

[fkromer]

@stanislaw I could find the class representations of ReqIf "entities" in reqif/reqif/models. For reading a ReqIf file I should be fine with ReqIFParser.parse(input_path: str), right? The returned ReqIFBundle should contain all the "entities"...

[fkromer]

After doing some research about ReqIF viewers I found reqifviewer which can visualize reqif file content. It's a C# / Blazor App using reqifsharp under the hood. There is a hosted version of the viewer https://viewer.reqifsharp.org/ and it can be run locally using docker. As long as reqif files generated from SDoc files can be visualized and the viewer provides all functionality required there is no need for reinventing the wheel.

[stanislaw]

However I'll provide the source code that others can make progress based on it.

@fkromer please go ahead! I would like to take a look at your code setup so far. Maybe it is not that hard to get to a minimum viable UI solution.

[stanislaw]

@fkromer I feel like I could give this idea a try. I would go with a web interface based on Vue.JS connecting to FastAPI connecting to a given Git repository with SDoc files via pygit interface.

I would start with simply browsing, then adding and then editing requirements. The backend could commit the edits to the Git repository via pygit.

Is there a skeleton you could share that I could check regarding the tech stack suggested by you, or should I try my own way?

Thanks.

[fkromer]

@stanislaw I‘ll provide what I‘ve done so far on monday.

[fkromer]

Feel free to use https://github.com/fkromer/strictdoc/tree/server .

[stanislaw]

Thanks for publishing this. I have started doing something very similar, and I think I got quite far already. Learning the Vue.js framework on the go, I will need to spend some time to get up to speed. The web-related work is a separate repository that will stay private for some time until I have something decent to show.

If there is anyone who is reading now or will read this in the future, and you have frontend experience, let me know if you would like to help. 🏗️ 👷

[stanislaw]

The web user interface and the web backend are now in place.

See this comment: #563 (comment).

See the initial design documentation: https://strictdoc.readthedocs.io/en/stable/strictdoc_21_design.html.