Design Decisions

This section records current architecture decisions and preserves the original design records. Historical records explain what the team decided at the time; they are not automatically a description of the current implementation.

In particular, the accepted 2025 data ADRs describe per-experiment schemas and dual medallion pipelines. Those mechanisms are superseded by the current central centrum decision below.

Current ADRs

• Consolidate experiment data in centrum — replaces per-experiment schemas, pipelines, and provisioning with central experiment-keyed tables and views.
• Replace ts-rest with oRPC — current contract, runtime validation, client, OpenAPI, and REST-compatibility boundary.
• Pin experiments to workbook snapshots — separates mutable authoring from immutable published execution, upgrade, and rollback.
• Execute macros in isolated language sandboxes — current Python, JavaScript, and R execution and security boundary.
• Use an offline-first mobile outbox — current SQLite, retry, MQTT acknowledgement, and offline recovery boundary.
• Replace Docusaurus with Fumadocs — current decision for the documentation application, static hosting, routing, search, API generation, and cutover safety.

Historical records and proposals

• MQTT data-ingestion topic proposal — introduced the versioned experiment ingestion topic that remains represented in asyncapi.yaml.
• Data governance model ADR — accepted in 2025; its per-experiment schemas and dual medallion model are superseded by the central centrum ADR.
• Data ingestion architecture ADR — accepted in 2025; its per-experiment pipelines and orchestration are superseded by the central centrum ADR.

Templates

• Proposal template
• ADR template

For current contracts use the generated REST API reference and MQTT API reference; for current system boundaries use Architecture & Pipeline.