The sweet spot in most use cases is just doing a straight workflow → graph serialization with a viz tool like Mermaid / Cytoscape / DOT e.g. Runic.Workflow — Runic v0.1.0-alpha.8
Usually just throwing this in Livebook or mermaid.live is enough to debug or document the workflow. I’ve found a read-only view in an admin panel something like this to just render the graph on a show page that shows execution history, errors, traces, etc tends to solve most problems with the least effort.
I’ve also done more on drag and drop builders and have it working pretty well on top of Liveview and Reactflow but its still specific to that app moreso than a library that I can open source. It ends up being a full app because you kind of want a component library which means you have to store components, and some components need parameters or forms to materialize so you need to persist forms in the database and do data driven validation. Then some components are only compatible with other components so there’s dataflow contracts to worry about. Then undo/redo, and some view/model separation where certain components should be rendered on the canvas different than the underlying dataflow its compiled to, etc, etc…
Frankly its a ton of work and I wonder how valuable it is from a UI ROI perspective considering how much work it is to get something usable enough to be worthwhile over editing code or having an agent write your workflow (which I’ve been doing more and more with Runic).
There’s some new Elixir libraries like GitHub - thanos/ExFlowGraph: LiveView-native node editor for Elixir · GitHub and GitHub - rocket4ce/live_flow · GitHub but I haven’t tried them yet.
I’ll probably release some tools for this with Runic eventually but haven’t been happy with the ROI or how specific the UX decisions are to the application they’re for.
I’ve actually released Runic on Hex recently (currently in alpha): it has a scheduling and execution layer with durable execution and some neat event-sourced based check-pointing and re-hydration capabilities for long running workflows so its worth checking out: runic | Hex .
