Add a Data Management System

Purpose

The SemApps project is primarily focused on the backend. You need a frontend if you want to interact with the semantic data that are managed by the backend.

However, it is important for many projects to offer visibility on the data they manage, and thus we have provided tools to help you easily build a Data Management System (DMS).

The DMS you will create on this guide is based on React-Admin, a complete framework to build backoffices with React. Used by thousands of developers, it is easy to adapt to your needs.

Prerequisites

The only prerequisites is to have NodeJS installed on your computer.

You will of course also need a LDP server, configured with a SPARQL endpoint. Please see this guide if you didn't set it up yet.

Setup the DMS

We provide a custom template for Create-React-App to ease the creation of the DMS.

To use it, run this command:

npx create-react-app my-dms --template @semapps/dms

You can now go to the newly-created directory:

cd my-dms

Launch the DMS

npm start

Your instance of the DMS is available at http://localhost:5000

Configuration

By default, the DMS will look on port 3000 of your computer for the LDP server. You can change this by editing the .env file or by adding a .env.local file. You will also be able to change the port of the DMS:

REACT_APP_MIDDLEWARE_URL=http://localhost:3000/
PORT=5000

Adding more resources

By default, the template will be configured to have one type of resource, of the semantic type foaf:Person. You can change this by editing the ./src/config/resources.js file:

export default {
  Person: {
    types: ['foaf:Person'],
    containerUri: process.env.REACT_APP_MIDDLEWARE_URL + 'resources'
  }
};

If no types are defined for the resource, React-Admin will fetch the data from the LDP container at the URL containerUri.

If types are defined, the containerUri field is required only if you need to create new data.

You can then modify the ./src/App.js component to list the resources, define an edit form, etc. Please see the example provided, and read the excellent React-Admin documentation.