✍️Elm-pen 0.0.6 - Generate your own Elm modules

[Lucas_Payr]

Hello everyone.
Im currently working on a little tool called Elm-pen and i think its about time to go into a first alpha phase and ask for feedback.

What is it?

Elm-Pen lets you generate any Elm module that you want, just from a set of json values.

Why use it?

proper Enum types with all the untility functions you would expect.
No more problems with nested records. just use the generated mappers
json encoders/decoders for records an custom types.

How can i use it?

1. Install it with npm install -g elm-pen.
2. Call elm-pen. This will generate a elm-pen.json file and some additional folders that you can ignore for now.
3. Add elm-pen/generated to you elm.json source directories.

In the elm-pen.json file you can specify the Enums, records and custom types and then call elm-pen again to generate the files.

Feedback Needed

Next time you create a new elm project, consider using elm-pen. I personally noticed that I’m getting the most out of it by generating my model with it.

But what do you think?
How does it help your project?
Are there any feature you are missing?
Would you use it a second time?

[Augustin82]

Hi! Looks very interesting. Do you think you could add the generated files that correspond to the example JSON you’ve provided? Cheers!

[Lucas_Payr]

Sure, here you are.

[georgesboris]

I’ve thought about similar things a lot while working on our elm app! Super interesting approach and I like the flexibility handlebars gives you.

It is also fun to grab other people standards “for free” when reusing their templates (e.g. I never used this index based functions for ordered enums - never needed them but I found them really interesting!)

The thing I usually think about as well is that it would be great to use elm when defining these templates somehow… similar to elm-review. I think Elm would benefit a lot from a standard templating layer used across the community!