Haven / Apps & SDK

Build real apps on top of your data

MindooDB Apps are real web applications that run inside Haven under strict permissions. They can be externally hosted or bundled into Haven itself. Build them by hand with the MindooDB App SDK, or generate them with AI using the same context files and example repo the Haven team publishes.

Concept

What a MindooDB App is

A MindooDB App is a web application that talks to Haven through a secure bridge. It can ship as a small tile inside a workspace page or take over a full browser tab - the API is the same.

  • Runs inside Haven - the app is rendered in an iframe or an opened window and communicates with Haven over a MessagePort bridge.
  • Sees what Haven grants - databases, views, and operations are all capability-based.
  • Online or offline - Haven-hosted bundles keep working when the network does not.
  • Works across tenants - a single app can consume data from multiple databases or tenants if granted.
Haven Applications page for adding, importing, configuring, launching, and placing apps on workspace pages
Applications page: configure and add applications, launch them directly, or place them on workspace pages.
Hosting models

Externally hosted or Haven-hosted

Choose the delivery model that fits your team and threat model:

Externally hosted

Deploy as a standard static web app on your own origin. Haven embeds it in a sandboxed iframe and connects via the SDK bridge.

  • Use your existing CI/CD, CDN, and auth story.
  • Great for early development and public demos.
  • Requires network reachability to the hosting origin.
Haven-hosted bundle

Import the app as a bundle into Haven. Haven's service worker serves it locally, which keeps the app usable offline and lets Haven enforce a stricter opaque-origin sandbox.

  • Runs offline - perfect for field use and secure environments.
  • Stricter sandbox than an external origin.
  • First-class fit for Haven Enterprise in-house app stores.
Capability model

Haven decides what each app can see

Haven Configure application dialog showing per-database capabilities for an app
Per-app capability grid: grant read, create, update, delete, history, attachment, and view-creation permissions per database and per app.
  • Read / create / update / delete per database.
  • History access for revision listing and time-travel.
  • Attachment operations including chunked streaming reads and writes.
  • View creation - let the app define its own virtual views or restrict it to Haven-configured views.
  • No ambient authority - apps cannot reach Haven storage, cookies, or other apps without an explicit grant.

See the full isolation design in Security & Privacy - sandboxing.

MindooDB App SDK

Everything you need to build a real app

The SDK is a typed TypeScript package that wraps the bridge protocol and exposes ergonomic APIs for the things apps actually need.

Launch context & events
  • Runtime mode, user info, and viewport.
  • Current light or dark theme from Haven so the app can match on first paint.
  • Mapped databases, views, tenant context, and launch parameters.
  • Live events: when the user toggles Haven's theme or resizes the viewport, every embedded app receives the update and can re-render instantly.
  • Host-rendered menus when overlays need to escape iframe bounds.
Documents & history
  • CRUD with filtered, projected, and metadata-only listing.
  • Summary-backed ad-hoc queries with declarative filters, dynamic sorting, and paging.
  • Full-text search integrated into queries: relevance-ranked matching over document text, rich-text content, and attachment text.
  • Live queries: the host pushes new results whenever the outcome actually changes.
  • Ad-hoc views created on the fly to categorize and aggregate query results - no upfront view configuration in Haven needed.
  • Deleted-document visibility for sync and cleanup flows.
  • Changefeed cursor checkpoints for incremental sync and indexes.
  • Revision listing and loading snapshots at any timestamp.
Attachments
  • List, upload, download, and remove attachments.
  • Chunked binary streaming for large files.
  • Preview support for images, PDFs, Markdown, text, Office, audio, and video.
  • Preview also works from historical snapshots.
Virtual Views
  • Categorized, sorted, filtered, and aggregated queries - think pivot table.
  • Haven-configured views and app-defined multi-database views.
  • Summary-first index builds - views are fed from the persistent summary buffer without materializing documents.
  • Typed view-language builder for formulas, filters, and derived columns.
  • Stateful navigator with paging, traversal, selection, and range lookups.
  • Host-pushed live updates via onDidUpdate - no polling required.
Testing & dev loop
  • App-test helpers and bridge protocol test helpers in mindoodb-app-sdk/testing.
  • Local development against a running Haven instance with hot reload.
  • Deploy as a standard static web app or as a Haven-hosted bundle.
Example code

Two tabs: a minimal launch + read snippet, and a copy-pasteable AI prompt you can feed to your agent of choice.

App Store

Install apps straight from Haven's App Store

Haven ships with a built-in App Store on the Applications page. Browse the catalog as a visual grid of app tiles, open an app to see its full description, version, and screenshot gallery, and install it with one click - Haven asks for the target tenant and lets you rename the app on the way in.

  • Rich catalog - every app comes with an icon, localized description, screenshots, and version info.
  • One-click install - pick a tenant, optionally adjust the application name, done. Permissions are preconfigured per app.
  • Your own store - custom Haven deployments can point at a self-hosted app store serving the same folder structure, so enterprises curate exactly which apps their users see. A natural fit for Haven Enterprise.
Haven App Store overview showing a grid of app tiles with icons, versions, and screenshots
The App Store overview: every app as a tile with icon, version, and a short summary.
Haven App Store detail view of Mindoo Vega with screenshot gallery, description, and Install button
The detail view combines the rendered description, a screenshot gallery, and the Install button.
Haven App Store install step with editable application name and tenant selection
Installing an app: choose the target tenant and adjust the application name before Haven registers it.
Getting started

Eight apps to learn from

Mindoo publishes MindooDB Apps you can study or install. Three are first-party productivity apps you can use in Haven today (Vega, TodoManager, and the Teacher's Desk workspace for teachers), three are open-source references for the SDK's granular editing APIs (TeamEdit for collaborative markdown, TeamGrid for collaborative spreadsheets with formulas, charts, and Virtual View Sheets, and TeamSketchbook for collaborative hand drawing), one is a beautiful responsive weather tile that doubles as a reference for the SDK's UX surface, and one is a guided tour of the SDK you can fork as the starting point for your own app.

Productivity
Mindoo Vega

Collaborative mind mapping, idea generation, and lightweight project tracking - the same tree-structured nodes render either as a Mindmap or as a Kanban board, with task fields (assignee, start/end dates, priority, status), tags, and integrated full-text search. Built on MindooDB's end-to-end encrypted sync.

Collaborative editing
Mindoo TeamEdit

Collaborative markdown editor built on the SDK's granular text patch API. Two windows can edit the same document and saves merge cleanly via MindooDB's Automerge text CRDT under the hood. Includes attachment-backed images and a Milkdown WYSIWYG editor. A focused reference for building real-time text editing apps on Haven.

Collaborative editing
Mindoo TeamGrid

Collaborative spreadsheet built on the SDK's granular JSON patch API. Around 280 Excel-compatible formula functions, Column, Bar, Line, and Pie charts, XLSX file and clipboard round-trip, and spreadsheet templates - all on a stable-ID document model so concurrent row, column, and cell edits across laptops and phones merge cleanly. The headline feature is Virtual View Sheets: drop any Haven Virtual View, including views that combine private, work, and partner-tenant data, into a worksheet as ordinary cells you can write formulas and draw charts over.

Collaborative editing
Mindoo TeamSketchbook

Collaborative multi-page sketch book built on the SDK's granular JSON patch API. Pen, marker, and eraser with a pen-only mode for stylus input, per-page paper styles (lined, squared, dotted, Cornell, music, and more), drag-and-drop page reordering, and PDF printing. Strokes are editable vector data and merge stroke-by-stroke across devices.

Productivity
Mindoo Teacher's Desk

A digital workspace that brings a teacher's whole day together in one place: timetable and calendar without duplicate data entry, lesson planning and documentation, materials with OCR search, class registers with seating plans, a flexible grade book, tasks, and hand-written notes - encrypted, offline-capable, and conflict-free across devices.

Productivity
Mindoo TodoManager

Lightweight task manager for personal and team todos, with local-first editing and real-time sync.

Responsive tile
Mindoo Weather

iOS-Weather-style forecast tile for one or more locations. A swipeable glass card over a full-bleed photographic background adapts to the tile size Haven reports - narrow tiles show a single location with dots, wider tiles show 2-4 at once. Uses the keyless Open-Meteo APIs so no secrets ever leave the sandbox. Great reference for launch parameters, viewport events, and responsive embedding.

Developer template
MindooDB App SDK example

Reference app that demonstrates the SDK surface - launch context, documents, attachments, views. Fork it as the starting point for your own app.

Screenshot gallery

See the demo apps across desktop, iPhone, and iPad

Browse the apps across desktop, iPhone, and iPad - Vega, TodoManager, the Teacher's Desk workspace for teachers, the TeamEdit collaborative markdown editor, the TeamGrid collaborative spreadsheet with charts and Virtual View Sheets, the TeamSketchbook collaborative hand-drawing app, and the responsive Weather tile.

Mindoo Vega desktop mind map showing nested projects, sprints, documents, and tasks
Mindoo VegaDesktop
Plan projects as a mind map

Mindoo Vega turns encrypted project data into a spatial mind map with nested projects, sprints, documents, and tasks.

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Build with AI

Let coding agents build MindooDB Apps for you

Every file a coding agent needs to write a MindooDB App is already published. Point your agent of choice at the following resources and it can scaffold real, working apps.

Resources to feed an AI agent
  • /llms-full.txt - full platform context, including the MindooDB App SDK, Haven bridge, and server setup.
  • /llms.txt - short index that lets an agent discover the rest.
  • Open-source reference apps to fork: mindoodb-app-example (a guided tour of the SDK's database, view, and event APIs), mindoodb-app-weather (a beautiful, responsive tile focused on the UX side of the SDK - launch parameters, viewport events, theming), mindoodb-app-teamedit (a collaborative markdown editor that demonstrates granular text patches and Automerge-backed save-time merging), and mindoodb-app-teamgrid (a collaborative spreadsheet with formulas, charts, XLSX round-trip, and Virtual View Sheets that demonstrates the SDK's granular JSON patch API on a stable-ID grid).
  • MindooDB App SDK README for the capability model and API surface.
Example prompt

Copy the prompt from the AI build prompt tab in the SDK code block above, drop it into Cursor, Claude, ChatGPT, or any other coding agent, and let it generate the app from the published context.

Three ways to get an app

Build it, generate it, or let us deliver it

DIY with the SDK

Fork the example, use the typed SDK, ship an externally hosted app or a Haven-hosted bundle.

DIY with AI

Point a coding agent at /llms-full.txt and the example repo, iterate quickly, review the permissions you grant.

Delivered by Mindoo GmbH

Let the team behind Haven build the app with you. See professional services.