Investigate possibility to remove assets' requirement on the backend

[grigasp]

The static assets' requirement introduces several problems:

• consumers need to make sure they're delivered to the right place
• consumers need to make sure presentation backend is initialized correctly for it to find the assets

It seems dropping this requirement is not impossible - need to investigate ways to do this.

Also see this: https://github.com/imodeljs/desktop-starter/pull/71.

[kabentley]

possibly this can be addressed by using a "presentation workspace," like we do for the GCS data?

[grigasp]

possibly this can be addressed by using a "presentation workspace," like we do for the GCS data?

At the moment our backend uses 2 types of assets:

• Localization files.
• Default BIS presentation rules for calculating instance labels, setting up sources for related properties, etc.

We have a work item to stop localizing data on the backend and instead defer that to the frontend. That would remove the need of static localization files on the backend for most cases, but not all of them - we still need to provide ability to localize data on the backend for backend-only apps. I'm not sure about the best approach here, but delivering them through a workspace seems like a possibility.

The default rules could definitely be delivered through a workspace. While we do provide a way to override them, looks like doing that through workspaces could be a much more elegant solution. In addition, that could also be a solution for delivering other domain-specific presentation rules (at the moment they're embedded into iModels).

We'll surely consider using workspaces when we'll start working on this item. Thanks.