CALM UI Hackday 25/11/25

[aidanm3341]

Planning for Hackday

We're having a hackday to brainstorm and work on a unified CALM UI.
The main two existing projects in this space are:

• CALMHub UI
• CALM Explorer

Proposed Plan:

• Identify features we like from both UIs
• Identify gaps in both UIs
• Create an ordered list of key features for the future
• Figure out what can be done in one day and can be done in parallel and get to work!

Let's use the comments to start posting some initial ideas.

[aidanm3341]

Some initial thoughts:

• I much prefer the actual visualization in CALM Explorer. Going with React Flow is the approach we should take, however we need to fix how it handles group relationships first
• The bigger focus on controls from the CALM Explorer is good
• Being able to explore the contents of CALMHub is essential
• We need hyperlinks inside the UI that will navigate to related documents, e.g. controls, patterns
• The UI should have deep linking support. I.e. the CALM resource ID should be embedded in the URL, so you can link someone directly to a specific resource
• Should the UI support editing features? We had previously specifically said we didn't want to do that, however CALM Explorer does allow it.

[rocketstack-matt]

We should also discuss the visualisations in calm-widgets and by extension the VSCode Extension to agree how (if) they all marry up. We certainly need improved visualization in the docify output.

[rocketstack-matt]

Ideas from Hack Day kick off:

• We prefer CALM Explorer visual
  • Needs ability to connect to CALM Hub + show what is there
  • How easy would it be to package up the React components from CALM Explorer and make them all individually usable? These could then be used by CALM Hub UI + CALM Widgets

Proposal:

• Refactor elements we like from CLAM Explorer + CALM Hub UI and package as reusable components in calm-widgets
• Update CALM Hub UI to use the calm-widgets
• Docify + VS Code Extension already use calm-widgets

Plan:

• Extract CALM Hub UI Tree view into calm-widgets (@aidanm3341)
• Refactor docify website mode to allow complete control over the website structure using calm-widgets (@LeighFinegold)
• Extract visualiser from CALM Explorer and embed in CALM Hub UI (@aamanrebello)
• Introduce UI e2e testing to CALM Hub UI (user simulation) (@YoofiTT96)

[aamanrebello]

I see this PR: #1852 (very cool) so I'll work on something that doesn't clash, like deep-linking