Code architecture

Welcome to the Silverfin code architecture guidelines.

The Silverfin Templating Language is incredibly powerful and has proven its capabilities at scale. However, we also recognise its unique constraints and limitations.

Over the years, through our own in-house development and invaluable feedback from our external developer community, we have identified common friction points that developers encounter. Building complicated workflows often introduces specific challenges around:

• Performance & Caching: Ensuring templates render efficiently without hitting processing bottlenecks.
• Circular References: Avoiding complex data loops that can compromise logic stability.
• Maintainability & Readability: Keeping code clean and well-organised so it remains easy to audit and scale.

To help you navigate these challenges and build bulletproof templates, we have gathered our collective learnings into actionable best practices and common pitfalls to avoid. We have broken this guidance down into two core pillars:

• Code Structure: A solid structure helps you keep code clean, readable, maintainable, and organised —both when starting something new and when improving existing work.
• Dataflow: Strategies for managing how data moves through your templates, optimising performance and reducing technical debt.