Structure your Makerkit Application
Learn how to structure your application with additional entities and business logic
In the previous section, we learned the fundamentals of Makerkit's architecture and the application layers.
In this section, we learn how to structure your application in practical terms with an example. For example, your application has an entity "events": how do we add this entity to a Makerkit application?
NB: entities rarely (or never) get added to "core". Business domain is added to "components" and "lib".
In short, this is how we add a new entity to the application:
- First, we add a new folder to
lib
. If the entity is "event", we addlib/events
. - Then, we add the components of the
event
domain tocomponents/events
- Finally, we add the pages of the
event
domain topages/events
- app - components - events - EventsContainerComponent.tsx - ... - lib - events - types - event-model.ts - ... - hooks - use-fetch-events.ts - use-create-event.ts - ... - utils - create-event-model.ts - routes - __app - events - page.tsx - $event.tsx
1) Adding the entity's business domain
We will add various business logic units in the lib/events
folder, such as types, custom hooks, API calls, factories, functions, utilities, etc.
Types
First, we define a type EventModel
at lib/events/types/event-model.ts
:
export interface EventModel { name: string; description: string;}
Custom Hooks
For example, let's write a custom hook that retrieves a list of "events" from a Firestore collection.
We create a file at lib/events/hooks/use-fetch-events.ts
with the following content:
import EventModel from '~/lib/events/types/event-model'export function useFetchEvents() { const firestore = useFirestore(); const eventsCollection = 'events'; const collectionRef = collection( firestore, eventsCollection, ) as CollectionReference<EventModel>; return useFirestoreCollectionData(collectionRef, { idField: 'id', });}
Good! We have a way to fetch our events, but we have to use it somewhere: to do so, let's create a component EventsListContainer
.
NB: remember to update the Firestore rules to be able to read the collection.
2) Components
As said before, we add React components that belong to the "events" domain to components/events
.
In the component below, we will fetch a list of events with useFetchEvents
:
import { useFetchEvents } from '~/lib/events/hooks/use-fetch-events';import Alert from `~/core/ui/Alert`;const EventsListContainer: React.FC = () => { const { data: events, status } = useFetchEvents(); if (status === `loading`) { return <p>Loading Events...</p> } if (status === `error`) { return ( <Alert type='error'> Ops, we encountered an error! </Alert> ); } return ( <div> {events.map(event => { return ( <div key={event.name}> <p>{event.name}</p> <p>{event.description}</p>; </div> ); })} </div> )};export default EventsListContainer;
3) Routes
Finally, we can add the events component EventsListContainer
to a page. To do so, let's create a page component at routes/__app/events/page.tsx
:
import EventsListContainer from '~/components/EventsListContainer';const EventsPage: React.FC = () => { return ( <EventsListContainer /> );};export default EventsPage;
🎉 That's it! We have now built a nicely structured "events" domain.