React-admin: ant design library

[MarkLyck]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

We're a small company using react-admin and love it!

However, I have to admit, we hate Material-UI and it's by far the biggest pain we have in our platform.

It would be so amazing if we could implement react-admin with ant design language: https://ant.design/

Ant design (in our humble opinion just works seamlessly and looks a lot better). They also surpassed Material UI in GitHub stars: https://github.com/ant-design/ant-design/

We'd be happy to either do all the work required to make an antd version of the ra-ui-material package.

But wanted to reach out first, to make sure that's something you'd be willing to merge if we went ahead and built that, I'd be happy to help maintain the antd portion after the fact as well if you're worried about any extra work to implement new features / fix bugs related to ui libraries.

@djhi really hope we'll hear back from you on this subject.

[fzaninotto]

Great idea!

I'm not sure you measure the work it is to maintain such a library (weeks of work for years), so even if you propose your help here, it's too big a risk for us to merge your work and be forced to maintain it in the future if you leave. Also, we can't commit on maintaining a huge amount of code we've not written.

But you can totally publish an independent ant design version - in fact, the react-admin architecture is designed just for that. So I suggest you publish the ant design package yourself, and open a PR here to link to it in the Ecosystem documentation.

[MarkLyck]

@fzaninotto that's a fair point.

Is there any way it would be doable without having to fork the react-admin repo? The reason we were hoping to get it merged in rather than just forking react-admin is so we don't have to merge all your future updates manually.

Does React-admin have the capability to easily switch from using ra-ui-material to another package with the same exports?

[djhi]

The react-admin package is made of two packages:

• ra-core which contains the core logic and components
• ra-ui-materialui which contains the Material UI components and uses ra-core

You don't need to fork react-admin but to create a new package ra-ui-antd. However, it might be a good idea to use the ra-ui-materialui package as a starting point.

[MarkLyck]

@djhi Thanks for the package structure overview, and yeah that was the plan, just copy over ra-ui-material, keep the unit tests the same and replace each UI component with antd versions 1 folder at a time.

And thanks for creating this awesome tool. I believe it was one of you two's presentation I saw about RA at React-Europe in Paris a few years ago.

[djhi]

Np 🙂 Hopefully we have migrated all tests from enzyme to testing-library. If not, it would probably be a good idea to help us migrate the remaining tests first.

Besides, it might help a lot to copy the cypress tests as well but we have to make sure they don't rely on material-ui markup first.

I think you saw @fzaninotto presentation at react-europe 😉

[MarkLyck]

@djhi Sure, I'd be happy to contribute with some test updates as well :)

Just setting up the basic work environment now.

The plan is to:

• Setup storybooks for everything. (great for UI libs)
• Get all tests running and passing.
• Migrate tests from Enzyme to react-testing-library (I'll create PRs 1 by 1 as I do this step)
• Migrate Material-UI to AntD

Luckily the specs don't seem specific to Material UI so they should for the most part "just work", haven't checked out the Cypress ones yet though.

If you want the Material-ui storybooks after I'm done, I'd be happy to contribute that as well? Let me know.

[Unforgiven-wanda]

@MarkLyck Any progress on this? I'd love to see a version of React-admin on Antd as well.

[MarkLyck]

@Unforgiven-wanda

I've got the setup and storybooks done, but sadly haven't gotten the time to finish it yet as we hit some pretty hard deadlines from our customers. But it's still on the roadmap to get done, hopefully soon 🤞

Would love to make this public actually if anyone wants to contribute.