Improve Discoverability of Interaction Templates hosted on FLIX

[JeffreyDoyle]

Issue to be solved

In order to promote composability of applications on Flow, we need a good way for developers to discover available Interaction Templates hosted on FLIX.

Suggest A Solution

Create a solution where developers can either programatically, or using a UI, discover existing Interaction Templates they can use that are already hosted on FLIX.

What are you currently working on that this is blocking?

No response

[bartolomej]

@JeffreyDoyle Related to this, I think the current REST API is quite limiting for allowing discoverability as you can't search for a template without knowing either the exact source code, name, or ID (afaik).

I'm trying to integrate FLIX in Flowser, but the current API won't support our current use cases:

• showing relevant FLIX templates for users' projects
  • this could be done by retrieving templates that depend on certain contracts (e.g. the ones used in users project)
• allowing users to search for existing templates with a natural language query
  • this could be done by supporting full-text search (of name, description or even source code)

I guess the way to achieve this now, would be to read the templates from the Git repo (https://github.com/onflow/flow-interaction-template-service/tree/master/templates) and implement the searching functionality on our end (or forking and extending flow-interaction-template-service).

[bartolomej]

I think we could support our use case by simply adding the ability to retrieve all available templates. I've implemented this on our fork and also added some related thoughts: onflowser#2

It could be useful for the official service to also support some variant of this feature to allow greater discoverability of templates.

[bartolomej]

Related: onflow/flow-cli#1226