Guidance: Provision an application configuration page and give guidance

[HaGGi13]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. Quite often it's necessary to provide an application configuration capability via UI and not appsettings.json file only. So that an user with higher privileges, like an application manager or administrator, is able to configure an applications behavior, style or thresholds in a convenient way. Current each product team has to implement or rather their own solution. This can lead to technical drawbacks, a suboptimal or simply different UX because no standardized method/solution is used. Thus, the end user is confronted with different behavior and UX per application. Furthermore, as it is a custom approach, it is not as easy to understand it than a standardized one.

Describe the solution you'd like An approach would be that the Guidance generates a blank configuration page that is already linked in the navigation menu. If it is not needed by the application (team), it can be just deleted/removed. In addition to that, the backend should be prepared as well, so that localization (resource dictionary) is supported and the business- and the data layer exist too (classes). In best case, a standardized way to store configuration in a database or file is already available and can be used out-of-the-box without any extension needed, except of the need to tangle it with the UI. By saying this, I mean the possible database structure and the applications' capability to reload all objects on configuration change too (object life cycle). Finally, I would expect a how-to article that describes the concept behind it so that I am able to follow it and adapt it in use.

Describe alternatives you've considered In comparison to the descripted solution before, an alternative approach could be:

• Guidance generates an empty configuration page;
• Configuration page is in navigation menu already available (linked)
• There is a kind of how-to/guidance article that
  • defines look and feel of the configuration page
  • current/best practices how to store configuration in database/file
• By Guidance generated code is able to handle configuration changes (object life cycle - reload all objects)

Additional context Unfortunately I have not any screenshots or mock ups, but want to highlight, that this topic seems to be a frequently requested feature, we may can automate/standardize a bit to speed its implementation up, so that we reduce the effort to invest, but provide each time the exactly same user experience.

Best regards, Christopher

[vvdb-architecture]

Part of this issue will be solved with Arc4u 8.2.0, which will give you the capability to store part of the appsettings.json data in a database. Exposing this via a user interface will be for you, since there are many aspects regarding validation and security that are application-specific.

[HaGGi13]

Okay, thank you. It's not what I meant with my suggestion, but it could be a part of another approach.

If the Arc4u development team expects this issue as solved by the means of the new feature, feel free to close it.