About building Retool as an engineer

[David_Zhong]

Hi all,

Hope you are doing well regardless of where you are in the world!

I just started my job as a contractor internal full stack engineer at an entertainment company where they built things years ago via Retool for their internal content system management. However, I am a frontend-focus fullstack developer who knows React. Having done my user interview with internal users, I can discover lots of UI logic flaws; Since I would work at the firm for only 6 months, my manager told me that they would prefer to use retool because they wouldn't need any engineers and yet they are open to other suggestions because Retool like now is somewhat limited in some dynamic requirements for business needs.

I checked the self-hosted option, but I realised there aren't any way for me to see application code since it is a proprietary software; I am quite frustrated that I couldn't write React code as I used to, and I don't think Retool is made for frontend engineers like myself, but I was hoping that I could find out about some balance.

For example, I would like to have more control to like let some users view different things based on their roles, and I also like to write code to implement UI logics and optimise UX based on my figma design and my user research. it seems no way that I could do so, or I am just unfamiliar with Retool.

Has anyone come across this situation as an engineer? how has your experience been?

Thank you,
David

[Jack_T]

Hi @David_Zhong,

If you are looking to write React code, check out custom components. This allows for you to build your own components instead of using our pre-built components.

Retool is the environment where our components and any user build custom components exist. This means that things will be limited compared to building out a JS/React app from scratch, but that has pros in that a lot of the boiler plate for a frontend is already created and built into Retool. With the drawback being you do not have unlimited customization.

Check out our docs on role based permissions, you can use the current_user object for greater in app granularity for what a user can view.

UI logic will be built into our 'Event Handler' where you can select 'Run script' to then write out javascript to do various operations and use our components and queries for accessing data.

For optimizing UX based on figma design, you may need to give me some more specifics on what your goals are. Definitely take full advantage of our docs and tutorials to see what Retool and and cannot do so you can best leverage the strengths of Retool while avoiding trying to build something that may not be supported

[Jack_T]

Hi @David_Zhong,

Just wanted to check in on how your project is going!

Let me know if any parts of my previous comment were helpful