Why Sanity Structure Tool?

Sanity Studio's native Structure Builder is incredibly powerful, but as projects grow, building complex, nested structures with it can become verbose, repetitive, and difficult to maintain.

Sanity Structure Tool is designed to simplify this process by providing a declarative, JSON-based API for defining your studio's structure.

The Problem

When using the standard Structure Builder, you often find yourself writing a lot of boilerplate code for common tasks:

• Singletons: Manually creating a list item that opens a specific document ID and hiding it from the main list.
• Pluralization: Repeatedly defining titles and icons for document types.
• Nesting: Managing deeply nested lists with multiple S.list().title().items([...]) calls.
• Workspace-based Content: Implementing conditional logic to hide or show content based on workspaces.
• Role-based Access: Implementing conditional logic to hide or show items based on user roles.

This imperative approach can lead to a structure file that is hard to read and even harder to refactor.

The Solution

Sanity Structure Tool allows you to define your structure as a clean, hierarchical data structure.

1. Declarative Syntax

Instead of chaining methods, you define what you want your structure to look like. This makes it easier to visualize the hierarchy and understand the layout at a glance.

2. Built-in Singleton Support

Creating a singleton is as simple as adding singleton: true to your configuration. The plugin handles the document ID generation, the editor view, and the filtering automatically.

3. Automatic Pluralization

By default, the plugin uses pluralize to generate titles for your document lists, but you can easily override this or disable it per item.

4. Workspace & Role Awareness

The tool is built with multi-role and multi-workspace environments in mind. You can easily restrict visibility of specific list items based on the workspace or the current user's roles.

5. Developer Experience (DX)

With full TypeScript support, you get autocompletion and type safety for your structure definitions, reducing the risk of runtime errors and making the development process much smoother.

6. Escape Hatch

Need to do something highly custom that the JSON API doesn't support? You can use the raw property to drop back into the standard Sanity Structure Builder whenever you need to.

Conclusion

Sanity Structure Tool doesn't replace the Structure Builder, it builds on top of it to offer a more maintainable and developer-friendly way to manage your Sanity Studio's desk structure.