Since the WeWeb Unify was launched, I’ve been looking to migrate my current workflows from using the Xano plugins (which exposes data on the frontend) to the Xano integration. Unfortunately, I’ve been struggling with it / it’s been poorly designed. Here’s the state of things:
What’s working
- I have successfully set up the Xano integration with Authentication enabled.
- I can only use the “API Request” action of the integration.
What’s not working:
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I can’t bind variables to an API endpoint. In Image #1, you can see there’s no way to bind the parameters individually (like we can for Collections or for the “API request” action of the Xano integration; it seems you can only bind the inputs as one JSON. So I tried to create a big JSON input but I couldn’t find the variables to bind the variables in the JSON to (see Image #2 in comments**)**. The variables just don’t appear. I’m a new user in this Community so I can only include one picture.
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I can’t create the equivalent of Collections scoped to just the data I want to surface, using the Xano integration because there is no way to bind the parameters to variables (see Image 3 in comments). I contacted Support and their response was that I should use a GET all to pull all the data from the Xano database table, and then use filters to get the desired view.
This is bad design for two reasons:
- First, exposing all my database tables’ data in WeWeb introduces a new surface area I have to worry about as far as protecting client data is concerned. If I’m not using a piece of data, I don’t want it being exposed. I want to maintain a single point of failure (Xano) rather than have the database table data exposed in two places.
- Second, this design by WeWeb assumes my endpoints simply filter data from my database tables. In practice, each endpoint could contain several processing steps (additional backend security checks, table joins, filters, transformations, etc.) before surfacing the data. This is not possible with basic filters on a table using WeWeb and frankly, I don’t want to rebuild the logic I have in each Xano endpoint in WeWeb. It will be too time-consuming, not to mentioned how redundant it will be.
As it stands, the Xano integration is not usable and the @weweb-team should look into this. If it’s just me not knowing how to use it, I’m open to learning.
It’s already a lot of work replacing the Xano plugin with the Xano integration and these issues make them much harder and undermine trust in the quaity of the experience built.
Image #1
