I'm curious if anyone has ever tried running retool using a custom backend (e.g. using resource queries for api calls to a flask app).
I have several apps that have some fairly complex javascript logic. The most intensive queries parse data uploaded from google sheets and do some QA against multiple sql tables.
I've been chewing on some ideas around putting that logic in a flask app and calling an API instead of putting the queries directly in retool. My initial thought is that it would make the more complex logic and easier to maintain. Plus I would only have to push a new release on retool for UI updates, not parsing logic.
Has anyone tried something similar? I'd love to hear what the results were like in terms of maintainability.
We pretty much run our entire apps with our own flask-waitress servers as the back end and use JS queries and transformers seldomly when needed for specific client-side operations.
@OLR Did you start with using just retool and then migrate to flask or have you been using flask from the start?
If the former - are there any non-obvious lessons that you had to learn or any unexpected issues that came up during the migration?
I'm a complete newbie to writing backends but I have a lot of python experience (mostly data science work and ETL pipelines), so I'm trying to get an idea of any challenges I should be prepared for before I start testing.
Not exactly what you are asking but I use Atlas triggers on mongodb to simplify any action (e.g clean up on deletion of related records etc, resource retrieval, cross lookups)
Probably data structures and parameter signatures are going to be the greatest headache. Your API would need to replicate the exact same structures and signatures as there are currently in retool. Or you design you API with other priorities in mind and need a mapping between data input/return values from API to retool components.