My dynamodb-admin fork (GUI for DynamoDB local)

I found a browser-based GUI to work with my local DynamoDB instance during development: dynamodb-admin by Aaron Shafovaloff. It’s the best I’ve found yet, because:

• it feels fast
• it uses an acceptable amount of RAM
• it works

Also, it’s open source, which means…

But I can make it better

After using it for few weeks, I wanted to improve a few things:

• better text search
• JSON validation of documents in DynamoDB
• reduce the amount of scrolling I do

So I went to work.

Replacing the Ace text editor with CodeMirror

I tried configuring the built-in with Ace editor, but couldn’t get it to behave the way I wanted. CodeMirror is used by CodePen which I’m more familiar with, so I switched to that. Then I made 3 changes:

1. I set up JSON validation which will notify me about invalid JSON in the editor’s gutter
2. Made the CodeMirror editor expand to always show 100% of the document so that my browse’s native search feature can always search the whole document instead just the content on screen
3. Make the save & delete buttons used fixed positioning so that they are always available at the top of the screen, even after I’ve scrolled down the page.

Sticky positioning on the Save & Edit buttons

This always trips me up. For position:sticky to work the way I want it to, I always have to make sure all parent elements of the sticky elements have a min-height of 100vh. In this case, main is the parent of nav, so main and its parents get their min-height set.

html,
body,
main {
  min-height: 100vh;
}
nav {
  position: sticky;
  top: 0;
  z-index: 100;
}

Where do I get this code?

This lives in its own branch at https://github.com/adamsullovey/dynamodb-admin/tree/use-codemirror-editor while I figure out if it could be merged back into the main project.

What else could I improve?

I want Command/Ctrl + S saved the updates to the document to the DB instead of having the browser prompt me to save the page to my hard drive.

layout: ../../layouts/BlogPost.astro

Other DynamoDB GUI tools that don’t work for me:

I tried these out and found they weren’t what I needed.

1. dynamodb-gui

   • does not work. It is just boiler plate with no routes for actually browsing anything

2. Toolkit for Elipse

   • poor support for our nested data, not worth the time taken to install java

3. Razor SQL

   • more features for other DBs I don’t need eat my RAM
   • not open source, so I can’t modify it to fit my needs