Problem space

Working across several projects we found a number of key areas were not being met by any existing admin tool solutions we could find:

• Governance: Effective role-based access so as to be truly DPA & GDPR compliant;
• Multi-database support: A number of projects have had 30+ microservices and having to maintain an admin panel for each is messy;
• CRUD tables: Most of the time what was needed was a simple searchable and editable table of data;

Technical challenges

One of the most significant challenges for the project was the technical difficulty of connecting to several databases simultaneously.

Luckily Rails 6 promised support for this and as soon as it was available we successfully implemented it.

Design challenges

While there are a number of standardised ‘bootstrap’ components that could have been used all together we didn’t find a brilliant table or permissions system solution our of the box.

For the tables we took inspiration from systems like Crunchbase which has a spectacular table UI.

For permissions, we had to innovate something new taking inspiration from various SaaS solutions and combining them into one usable UI.