Building a Metadata-Driven Framework for Developers

At Uxeed, our name says it all: UX + Succeed. We believe that for any project to succeed, you must focus on the user’s experience.

But what happens when the “user” is a developer?

This was the core question of a recent project with a major software company that provides a leading ERP for the Oil & Gas industry. They were in the process of modernizing their robust, highly customizable system by adding a new REST API layer.

This modernization effort meant building a whole new generation of web applications. The challenge was immense.

The Challenge: How to Build Hundreds of Custom Views… Fast

Our client’s ERP system is powerful precisely because it’s so customizable. Its views can be dynamically generated, and it’s all governed by a well-defined design system.

Their development team, using Angular, was faced with a daunting task:

• How do you build new web applications that can handle this dynamic metadata?
• How do you maintain 100% compliance with the strict design system across all new apps?
• How do you do this without forcing developers to “reinvent the wheel” for every single grid, filter, and drawer, turning every new view into a multi-week project?

They needed to build faster and more consistently. They didn’t just need a component library; they needed an entire development framework.

The Solution: A Metadata-Driven Framework with the Developer in Mind

We embraced the “Uxeed” philosophy and treated the client’s developers as our primary users. We set out to build a framework that was not only powerful but also intuitive and easy to use.

We did this by designing a system of “building blocks”—smart, high-level Angular components that were layered together:

• Core Components: First, we built the basics (grids, filter components, drawers, headers, context menus, export features).
• Deep Integration: Crucially, these components were built to integrate directly with the client’s design system and their new REST API.
• Metadata-Driven Magic: The components are “smart.” A developer can simply drop in our grid component, and it automatically understands how to query the API for its metadata, dynamically building the correct columns and filters.

The true power of a framework, however, isn’t just in what it does automatically—it’s in the control it gives the developer.

A developer can use the “default” grid, which might take a few minutes, or they can choose to customize it:

• Select only specific columns to display.
• Customize the behavior of specific filters.
• Provide “override renderers” for an entire view. For example, if one application needs a unique “Well Overview” page, it can provide its own renderer for that specific view while inheriting all the other boilerplate functionality (data-fetching, headers, tasks) from the framework.

This layered approach allows developers to go from a simple library of components to a true framework, hosted as Azure artifacts so they can easily integrate and manage versions.

The Results: Speed, Quality, and a Thriving Developer Ecosystem

The impact on the client’s development team was transformative.

• Massive Speed Increase: The most significant result. Building a new, standard grid view with filters went from a few weeks of work to just a few hours.
• Built-in Quality and Testability: We follow SOLID principles to ensure the framework code is clean and maintainable. More importantly, we also provided a suite of test utilities so developers can easily mock the libraries. This has led to over 80% test coverage across all their new web apps—a number that is world-class for enterprise software.
• The Ultimate “Developer Experience”: By focusing on the DX, we provided a framework that is easy to use, makes sense, and empowers developers to build high-quality, consistent applications at a speed that was previously impossible.

This project is a perfect example of our core belief: when you focus on the “UX” of the developer, your entire software ecosystem will “Succeed.”

Is your development team bogged down, rebuilding the same components for every new project? Let’s talk about how a custom-built framework can accelerate your entire organization.