How to extend React Admin and why is it needed?

Are you a react developer and deal with React Admin? You might have thought about extending the react admin in your career life. If you are curious to unlock the question on how to extend react admin and its need then you have landed on the correct destination here.

In this article, we are going to share with you an introduction of React admin, its purpose and the process of improving it. So all those react developers who want to know about extending react admin should stay with this article.

React Admin

React-Admin is a web framework that uses Material UI, React, Redux and React Router to give a unified admin framework. This kind of framework is mainly used for implementing B2B applications, and it also acts as a way of interaction with the database or API to the user. The API will allow applications to access the resources. Most of the developers like to use it in mobile app development.

React Admin is a frontend framework so it uses GraphQL APIs or REST. Developers can easily create frontend admin applications that will interact with the back end in a standardized way. It passes data providers for this purpose.

Furthermore, it also uses an adapter approach that acts as an interface between the backend and framework. This allows you to focus on the dashboard building in the modular steps.

React admin also offer some of the interesting features as follows:

Understanding through an example

Imagine that you download the desktop application for the accounting software. Before accessing its content, it will ask you to sign in to your account. It is because it wants to pull all the user information from an external database. When you sign in, the desktop app will send the data to the cloud API and it will return the user data to the desktop app.

This is not always the case and most developers like to decouple their front end user interface from the back end database. The decoupling needs a front end to be integrated with multiple databases, servers and services.

Reason to choose React Admin

Using React Admin

The database is a core and crucial point for many applications. For non-technical business owners, it is necessary to handle and manage the database in an easy way. Thanks to React Admin that creates an easy and intuitive way to make an easy interaction.

For any B2B application, authentication and authorization is compulsory and luckily React Admin has a built-in entry point for both these factors. The user interface of React admin is modern and integrates fast. This makes it ideal for the developer’s preference.

How to Improve and Extend React Admin?

The software development team will look at new features and UI elements that they desire to add. There can be more improvement made in the react admin. Here we can cover three factors on which this improvement can be done.

Data input for one to Many Relationships and UX for the large forms:

There are excellent components available in React Admin to add simple data to complex document objects. However, there is a lack of an interface to associate many collections with one entity.

For example, a company’s employee may have a name, employee ID, address and email. It’s fine to simply add these entities. But what if there are two emails?

It might be trivial to add a couple of phone numbers but this collection can be a complicated one.

Data Manipulation:

It is central to React Admin to display data grids and tables. This is how you could not drag and drop rows in a table to sort them. Sometimes users need to export the data tables and this might be either for a different application or to review.

Usually, there is a need of exporting data tables for reviewing on paper or for different applications. All columns will show up on the export as React Admin cannot export data for the selected columns. A column export configuration is a helpful feature to extend React dashboard.

In the above code, the element is mainly responsible for mapping the name property to an endpoint in the API.

User Experience (UX)

While adding different records related to one another, someone might have noticed the user has to click too many times. Users need to navigate away from the record which they are currently viewing, add the related record on the different view and then navigate back to the original record. Later on, select the newly created record to relate it.

This concept is a highly complex and time-consuming one. Instead of it, one can create pop-up modal components to improve the UX, create new records and then relate them.

Here we have made links on our email column clickable by using the element. After that, we have added a label property to the company column. This will make headers more presentable in the making of react admin panel.

Let’s navigate to App.js and replace ListGuesser with UserList

More Extensions

As a part of Enterprise Edition, React Admin has begun to offer private modules purchased. With the help of it, users can easily buy modules with multi-level navigation or calendar.

Final verdict

Due to flexible modern and open-source, React Admin is widely accepted for B2B applications mostly. However, there are many other parts where improvement is required. Here we are ending our words and also hope that it will clear your understanding of the requirement of improvement in the React project. You can connect with the leading mobile app development company to grab experience and talented resources about react development.

 
 
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