Question: Form for creating/editing json

[FajnB]

This might be a dumb question but is there a some sort of editor where I can just input the data or is it for now just manually creating/editing the json files.
As you can see, I am not too good with this soooo.... I can definitely make a correct json manually, but I am sure there must be an easier way.

[Donkie]

Nope, currently there is no form. People are manually editing json files.

If anyone wants to create such a form, I'd gladly incorporate it here somehow :)

[RoyalNautilus]

I started looking into this, as I do think it's not user-friendly to be comfortable with editing JSON to be able to contribute to this DB. Even for those who are comfortable, it's not the fastest process either, at least compared to a form.

The immediate roadblock I ran into is the somewhat static nature of GitHub Pages. It seems adding any kind of form to the https://donkie.github.io/SpoolmanDB/ page requires integration with a third-party service, and from what I'm seeing, most of those only interact by sending an email with form contents.

My next thought was integrating the submission process into the Spoolman app itself? This could actually simplify things long-term for situations like adding colors, where you can "clone" filaments but change only the color-related fields.

I'm not much of a developer, nor familiar enough with the automation process of GitHub, but using a form in Spoolman to dynamically create a URL to create a new issue in GitHub, using something like this: https://docs.github.com/en/issues/tracking-your-work-with-issues/using-issues/creating-an-issue#creating-an-issue-from-a-url-query or this: https://github.com/sindresorhus/new-github-issue-url. Alternatively, I wonder if these URL-based systems could open PRs instead to avoid the change in system for adding filament.

Any thoughts?

[ezraclintoc]

If we were to have a form, would it create a pull request to make changes? Or would it add them automatically? Or maybe a system where it creates a branch, and eventually you can merge the branches?

[kquinsland]

page requires integration with a third-party service, and from what I'm seeing, most of those only interact by sending an email with form contents.

Basically, yeah. That's the downside of static pages.

It would be relatively straight forward to build a "single html and js in one file" style tool that would only need the user to provide a GH/PAT (for the API calls to make the PR). It would be considerably trickier to do oAuth or similar so a static HTML file that builds the json for the user and can automate the process of opening the PR is probably the way to go. That HTML page is then trivial to host just about anywhere.

The tricky bit will be the schema that the form uses to validate things. Once that's fleshed out and ratified, it's trivial to hand the schema to an LLM and say "give me a html form that follows schema.json ..."