Manage foundry forges via UI?

[deergitseason]

As with many of you, I'm desperately looking for a solution to reuse card configs. I've used streamline card, and i wasn't a fan of creating inside the main lovelage config file.

UI Foundries feels more intuitive for me (I like the simple merge functions), however it still doesn't fix my main want of being able to edit and design card configs using the GUI.

Specifically, most of my layout uses Bubble Cards and I really like customizing my cards using the GUI.

Global Cards https://github.com/dj3030/Global-cards was a new addition that allowed referencing existing cards in the gui, however it is a little unstable and might already be abandoned (vibe coded surely)

I understand not being able to edit my forges using the Bubble Card GUI, but I was wondering if there was any workaround to let me manage my foundries using the card's gui (that doesn't involve copy/pasting the YAML back and forth into the gui editor).

Thanks in advance!

[dcapslock]

Editing a Foundry using a UI would be the holy grail indeed. Alas!, as the card edit exprience is tighly integrated to Frontend realtime experience it is very hard to decouple to then allow placeholders (billets), templates etc. I was able to achieve this with Browser Mod tile and badge, but that is only because the replacements (local Browser sensors) are known and so manageable. Taking the bare code form there and introducing pure unknown replacements etc. may not even be achievable.

Some ideas I have played with.

• Blueprint style card import, but still without UI so would not provide what you desire.
• Separate Foundry edit dashboard where 'hacks' happen to allow design with placeholders, templates etc. This could work, but for Bubble Card popup testing it would still likely be problematic.
• An offline editor where custom cards are available with data mocked. However handling templates gets tricky as there would need to be a away of mocking your own template results.

None of the above would be easy and would be time consuming. Forge developer to be able to template cards. Foundries was a natural extension to allow forge code reuse. Neither was designed for UI mainly as templates would need to be injected into a host cards editor, which is next to unachievable.

Open to hearing ideas from the community on this. Together a solution may emerge. 🤞

[Mariusthvdb]

I understand not being able to edit my forges using the Bubble Card GUI, but I was wondering if there was any workaround to let me manage my foundries using the card's gui (that doesn't involve copy/pasting the YAML back and forth into the gui editor).

Open to hearing ideas from the community on this. Together a solution may emerge. 🤞

what you want is clear, and would be awesome : have a UI editor that could handle all the custom plugins options, and not choke in the real time render at it.

Reality is that even main HA core/frontend UI editors only allow for certain limited functionality. And that is by choice. UI is for 'easy' edits. If one needs more involved configs, be it Frontend or Core, one needs to use yaml. Period. (not my pov, but the devs.)

Having said that, even in Yaml it can be annoying to have to c&p the same configs over and over.

Luckily, Yaml has more than a few techniques that allow us to 'inject' blocks. Combine those with native HA support for includes, and I believe we hit the sweet spot. Or. at least the maximum of what is currently possible.

Want the same card on each and every view? just inject it with an !include.
Yes, you'd need yaml mode for that, because UI doesnt allow includes.

Want the same styling on all entities cards? create a class in UIX theming, or, a bit less generic, write the styling block, save it as a separate yaml file, and include that in the cards you want it. There is a lot of granularity, allowing us to write as little yaml as possible

long story short, comment on this discussion:

No I dont think al lot of time should be spent on a UI editor with all whistles and bells for foundries.

(btw I forgot to mention lovelace-gen, or a project RomRider is working on Jinja Board )

maybe that could help ease the pain of re-writing all.