Is there a way for tools to have a custom management UI within the Dashboard?

[wildassoler]

Summary

I'm building a flashcard/spaced-repetition tool, and I'd like users to be able to manage content (add/edit cards) from the Dashboard — with fields specific to my tool (front/back of a card), not just a generic file upload.

What I checked

I searched the SDK and docs for anything related to "dashboard" and found only one reference, in docs/tool_metadata/README.md, which is about displaying the tool's version string on the dashboard — nothing about a customizable UI or content management surface for third-party tools.

Question

Is there a way (existing or planned) for a tool to expose its own custom interface within the Dashboard — e.g. a form for adding/editing structured content — rather than just generic file upload via the File Manager? If not, is generic file upload (with the tool parsing an uploaded file, e.g. CSV) the intended way to handle this kind of use case?

[dupontgu]

I'm glad you asked this because we're actively thinking about it.

• We're almost certainly not going to deploy any custom logic to our cloud-based dashboard.
• We are considering adding the ability to to edit structured data right in the File Manager UI, and this is a pretty compelling case for that. Likely won't ship with version 1 of the File Manager but I'll keep those conversations going.
• I recognize it's not ideal, but for now I'd recommend statically hosting an editor page that users can use to generate a file that can be dropped in via file manager and have your tool pull from that.

[wildassoler]

That's great to hear — that's exactly the kind of solution that would help. A couple of thoughts that might be useful as you keep thinking about it:

• Even a simple schema (field name + type: text, number, choice) would cover most cases like mine (flashcard front/back), without needing anything too elaborate.
• Would this editing happen locally on the device's File Manager, or also be accessible from the desktop/dashboard side when managing files remotely? Being able to edit from a computer would be a big plus for content-heavy tools.

Thanks for the transparency on this!

[dupontgu]

The File Manager (probably renamed soon) will be a browser-based UI (so usable on desktop/smartphone) that will talk directly to a users Light Phone over WiFi. We're trying to take advantage of the some of the perks of the dashboard without needing to deploy any server-side code.