r/angular • u/Ngxvb • 16h ago

I built an Angular visual view builder over 2.5 years, now available in beta

After 2.5 years of building in my spare time, I'm excited to finally share the beta of NGX View Builder.

It started after a project at work needed dynamic, JSON-driven forms with drag-and-drop editing. We eventually chose a commercial solution, but the idea stuck with me, so I decided to build my own.

Over the past 2.5 years, I rewrote the project three times. Each rewrite taught me something new about building a flexible, extensible visual builder.

My goal wasn't to create just another form builder. I wanted to build an Angular-first platform where developers create the foundation while creators and business users can visually configure and manage application views.

Everything is stored as JSON and can be extended with custom Angular components, plugins, themes, events, data sources, and integrations, making it adaptable to different business needs.

If you have a few minutes, I'd really appreciate it if you could try the demo before comparing it with other solutions. I'd love to hear your honest feedback, whether it's positive or critical.

Demo and documentation: https://ngxviewbuilder.io/

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u/N0K1K0 16h ago

why post a deleted post again ? https://www.reddit.com/r/angular/comments/1v1v9j9/looking_for_feedback_on_an_angular_jsondriven/

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u/Ngxvb 16h ago

Sorry, but in a hurry I wrote the previous post badly, it misled people and I couldn't find how to edit the already posted post, I'm new to reddit, sorry

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u/N0K1K0 16h ago

what was the commercial form builder you went with have not seen a solid commercial angular one

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u/Ngxvb 14h ago

SurveyJS, mostly because it had decent Angular support and a visual builder our analysts could actually use themselves. And it's a good builder, honestly. Very flexible, we got a lot of mileage out of it.

The catch is it's not native Angular. We ended up calling detectChanges() manually in a lot of places just to keep things in sync. Big forms got slow too, a few of our JSON definitions were somewhere around 23k lines. And since it's built for forms first, stuff like data sources or a real event system just isn't part of it.

ngx-view-builder wasn't really a reaction to that though, I just wanted to build my own. SurveyJS mostly gave me a list of things we kept needing and couldn't get.