- Goal:
I'd like to format our data (model) for our UIs (view), and have tried two different approaches. Curious what other people think about this problem.
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I started months ago by placing JS one-liners all over the apps. For example: "if this text is too wide, decrease the markdown header from h2 to h3." or "if this data field is empty/null, make the background color gray and the text dark gray"
- This was great for a prototype, but quickly grew unmaintainable when there might be 20 of these per app and the same sort of formatting treatment needed to be synced across multiple components, modules, and apps.
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So then I moved all the formatting to a central SQL query which generated JSON rows in a "gold" table used by multiple apps. This was great for maintainability and visual consistency.
- However, now we need to build and join on a table full of all-string fields in JSON, which is both poorly-performing and hard to wrangle in queries.
I'm considering an AWS Lambda Function which acts as a Controller, allowing apps to retrieve formatted data. But it would be more work than JS one-liner or SQL.
