enlace-java

Spring Boot starter adapter for Enlace — an interactive visual execution graph for any OpenAPI 3.x API. Drag operations from your API onto a canvas, wire inputs to outputs, and run multi-step workflows concurrently from the browser. Full documentation: get-enlace.github.io.

This adapter's job is intentionally small: it serves your OpenAPI document and the canvas UI's static bundle. Nothing else — wiring up a chain, concurrent execution, and holding credentials all happen client-side in the browser.

Install

<dependency>
    <groupId>io.github.get-enlace</groupId>
    <artifactId>enlace-spring-boot-starter</artifactId>
    <version>0.0.9</version>
</dependency>

Usage

Nothing to wire up by hand — adding the dependency is enough. Spring Boot's autoconfiguration mounts the canvas at /enlace as soon as it's on the classpath, for a project already running springdoc conventionally:

@SpringBootApplication
public class Application {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        SpringApplication.run(Application.class, args);
    }
}

Open /enlace and the canvas loads, reading your resolved spec from /enlace/api/spec.

To customize the mount path or point at an explicit spec:

# application.properties
enlace.path=enlace
enlace.spec-url=https://internal-host/custom/openapi.json

Resolving your OpenAPI document

Unlike some adapters, you never pass your spec in directly — this one finds it for you:

1. Zero-config default — if your app already runs springdoc conventionally, its spec is already being served at /v3/api-docs; the adapter defaults to that path with no configuration needed.
2. Auto-detect fallback — if that doesn't resolve, it tries a short list of other conventional paths (/v3/api-docs.yaml, /swagger.json, /openapi.json) with a plain HTTP request to your app's own server — no reflection into route tables or framework internals.
3. Explicit override — set enlace.spec-url to point at anything else: a customized route, a different service's spec, a static file.
4. Failure is loud, not fatal — if nothing resolves, the app keeps running (the UI shell still loads) but GET /enlace/api/spec reports the failure with what was tried, and the application log names it at ERROR, rather than rendering a silent empty canvas.

How it works

Adding the starter registers a servlet filter mounted at enlace.path (/enlace by default) with two things on it:

• GET /{path}/api/spec — resolves your OpenAPI document once at startup (see above), then re-fetches it fresh on every request rather than caching it, so a spec that changes at runtime shows up on the next canvas reload with no restart needed.
• The canvas UI's static assets, at every other path under the mount — a prebuilt bundle shipped inside the enlace-spring-boot-starter jar itself, not fetched over the network at request time.

It's a plain filter rather than a @RestController on purpose — a controller is discoverable by springdoc's own request-mapping scan, which would otherwise list Enlace's internal routes alongside your API's real operations in your generated spec.

Everything past that — parsing the spec into operations, letting you wire a chain together, actually sending requests to your API when you hit Run — happens in the browser, in the UI bundle. This adapter never sees or proxies that traffic.

Architecture

The Spring Boot starter is intentionally thin and symmetric across Enlace languages: it mounts a web filter that serves the static UI assets and exposes your OpenAPI document. All workflow execution runs client-side directly from your browser to your API endpoints, with local IndexedDB autosave.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md for local development setup and build/test commands.

License

MIT