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I do see you pivoted away from some developer tooling things, like mock APIs generated from your database schema (that was a thing previous, no?). While I see y

I do see you pivoted away from some developer tooling things, like mock APIs generated from your database schema (that was a thing previous, no?). While I see you have the mock api generator service, I seem to recall you guys had a more robust paid offering that would read your database schema and spin up a mock API. Any reason you pivoted away from that product? I quite literally am in search of a company that will do this that doesn't also want to be our API provider in production. EDIT: I also want to point out, I really like how mature the product has become from the time I looked into it last (I wan to say maybe a year ago, maybe year and half). Seriously considering replacing some internal admin functionality with it.

tomhallett 4y ago
I have nothing todo with Retool, but I'm curious about the problem you are trying to solve. What do you want to consume the mock api? a) Is this for rapid prototypes? (web? mobile?) b) Do you have a microservice architecture and you want to mock out one of the services? (dev? ci?) c) something else? Lets say the generator looks at your schema and generates an api, how much would you want to tweak/customize that api? Is the mock api returning data based on what's in the database? If so, can the mock api mutate data in the database?
- no_wizard 4y ago
  Cloud services have a real problem, they don't all have nice emulators for data or seeding. I'd love to setup a sandboxed test database automatically, and seed it with random data based on that schema (and perhaps some heuristics, like intentionally breaking some entries or random incomplete data sets) and I'd like do it without incurring the cost of maintaining this fully in house. I know in some cases, like with GraphQL, I can do this somewhat easy if I use a 3rd party service, I know with something like AppSync there is some potential to run it locally via an emulator, but honesty the DX story around Cloud services is kind of crappy, and this would go a long way in solving that story.
  - Hansenq 4y ago
    Interesting...would it be accurate to say that the issue you're facing is being able to generate and access mock data for testing purposes? I'm working on building something in this space. Would love to chat with you about your use case; mind emailing me at hq@ withcodex.com? Thanks!
dvdhsu 4y ago
Ah, we still have a way of generating mock APIs: https://retool.com/api-generator https://retool.com/api-generator. You can upload a CSV (we'll parse the columns and guess types for each one), and then generate mock data and put it into an AIP for you: https://retool.com/utilities/generate-api-from-csv https://retool.com/utilities/generate-api-from-csv. In the future, we'd love to make it more robust; we're currently working on a database-y product (think Airtable, but backed by postgres). It would be really cool to have mock data-generation built in to that product.
- hanniabu 4y ago
  Wow this is amazing, how have I not seen this before. Looking forward to all the continued improvements and additional features!

tomhallett 4y ago

I have nothing todo with Retool, but I'm curious about the problem you are trying to solve. What do you want to consume the mock api? a) Is this for rapid prototypes? (web? mobile?) b) Do you have a microservice architecture and you want to mock out one of the services? (dev? ci?) c) something else? Lets say the generator looks at your schema and generates an api, how much would you want to tweak/customize that api? Is the mock api returning data based on what's in the database? If so, can the mock api mutate data in the database?

no_wizard 4y ago
Cloud services have a real problem, they don't all have nice emulators for data or seeding. I'd love to setup a sandboxed test database automatically, and seed it with random data based on that schema (and perhaps some heuristics, like intentionally breaking some entries or random incomplete data sets) and I'd like do it without incurring the cost of maintaining this fully in house. I know in some cases, like with GraphQL, I can do this somewhat easy if I use a 3rd party service, I know with something like AppSync there is some potential to run it locally via an emulator, but honesty the DX story around Cloud services is kind of crappy, and this would go a long way in solving that story.
- Hansenq 4y ago
  Interesting...would it be accurate to say that the issue you're facing is being able to generate and access mock data for testing purposes? I'm working on building something in this space. Would love to chat with you about your use case; mind emailing me at hq@ withcodex.com? Thanks!

dvdhsu 4y ago

Ah, we still have a way of generating mock APIs: https://retool.com/api-generator https://retool.com/api-generator. You can upload a CSV (we'll parse the columns and guess types for each one), and then generate mock data and put it into an AIP for you: https://retool.com/utilities/generate-api-from-csv https://retool.com/utilities/generate-api-from-csv. In the future, we'd love to make it more robust; we're currently working on a database-y product (think Airtable, but backed by postgres). It would be really cool to have mock data-generation built in to that product.

hanniabu 4y ago
Wow this is amazing, how have I not seen this before. Looking forward to all the continued improvements and additional features!