
Ask HN: What are you using for managing reference data in your app? - paramz
Hi HN, In almost every company I have ever worked in, we had some in-house solution for managing so-called dictionaries&#x2F;parameters&#x2F;reference-data. If you still wonder what I am talking about: assume you would have some data that normally you would put in an enum, but it would have to be dynamic and business people would need to have control over it, what would you use? Admin panel would be probably the first choice, but sometimes there are not enough resources or budgets to do so. Feature toggles are the closest thing that comes to my mind when I think about the potential product, but its use case is somewhat different (lack of queries, versioning, it is not suited to have lots of data). I have decided with my friends that we could deliver a solution to this problem, but I wonder if this is something that you would use or maybe you already using some solution that solves this problem?
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smt88
I've been in software for 20 years and can't figure out what use case you're
talking about.

Can you explain or give more concrete examples?

If you want to sell a product to people who don't have time to build an admin
panel, that's a market without much time or money -- both of the things they
need to research your product, test it, and integrate it.

~~~
paramz
Let's say you have a platform where you can define excel-like tables
(parameters), each change to this table creates a new version. Assume that
after creating this parameter new version is created with generated rest
endpoint to it. e.g.

/param/currencies/version/1

could give you

{ data: [ EUR, USD, SEK, GBP ] }

Use cases: \- You have in your app map with store locations. Adding or
deleting these locations would require some kind of UI or access to DB, you
could create param and fetch this data from there

\- There are discounts feature in your app, you could define a parameter with
discounts for each product, and non-technical people could easily change its
values without developers assistance

\- You can create whitelists, blacklists, addresses, descriptions almost
anything that changes and non-technical should have the possibility to
configure/change.

Of course, creating parameters and managing them would be done through simple
UI.

The only thing the developer has to do is to integrate the feature with rest
API

Let me know what you think. I am really interested in knowing your point of
view and if this is something that you could find useful.

