Enterprise Component Library Architecture
Component library architecture for enterprise construction management platform.
Summary
Chunk Creations contributed to the architecture and development of a React component library serving Autodesk Construction Cloud — a platform used by construction professionals worldwide to manage large-scale projects. The library ensures UI consistency across multiple product teams and supports thousands of end users daily.
The engagement addressed complex technical challenges at enterprise scale: achieving WCAG accessibility compliance, resolving systematic testing failures, and building type-safe component APIs that prevent entire categories of runtime errors.
The Challenge
The platform required a robust, scalable component library that could serve multiple product teams while meeting enterprise standards. Key requirements included consistent UI components across teams without duplicating effort, WCAG 2.1 compliance for legal and ethical obligations, maintaining quality during rapid feature development, and supporting sophisticated UI patterns such as virtualized lists, complex dropdowns, and polymorphic elements.
The existing components had accumulated technical debt — flaky tests blocked deployments, accessibility violations created legal exposure, and type safety gaps caused runtime errors in production.
Key Deliverables
Polymorphic Component Architecture
Components needed to render as different HTML elements while maintaining full TypeScript type safety. The engagement delivered a polymorphic component system using advanced TypeScript generics, where components dynamically adapt their type signature based on configuration. This eliminated an entire class of runtime type errors and established the reference implementation for all future polymorphic components.
Accessibility Remediation
An accessibility audit revealed multiple ARIA violations in interactive components affecting screen reader users and creating compliance risk. The engagement delivered comprehensive remediation: replacing semantic anti-patterns with proper interactive elements, correcting invalid ARIA attribute references, building a sanitization layer for third-party integrations, and ensuring proper keyboard navigation and focus management. The library achieved full WCAG 2.1 compliance.
Deterministic Text Truncation
A text truncation feature caused numerous flaky visual regression tests, blocking the CI/CD pipeline. The root cause was non-deterministic DOM manipulation racing with browser font loading. The solution replaced iterative DOM mutations with an efficient binary search algorithm, implemented synchronous text measurement via the Canvas API, and added proper font loading detection. This eliminated all flaky tests and established a reusable pattern for future DOM measurement scenarios.
Dropdown Interaction Redesign
Users experienced confusion with autocomplete behavior when reopening dropdowns after selection. The engagement redesigned the state management to clear input on reopen, pin selected items for context, implement intelligent filtering, and ensure proper blur/focus behavior for form validation. This eliminated user confusion and improved task completion rates.
Virtualization System Extension
Custom group headers were not rendering correctly in virtualized dropdown menus when filtering resulted in single groups. The engagement extended the virtualization system with context-aware rendering that adapts between virtualized and static layouts, enabling product teams to add contextual UI elements while maintaining performance for large datasets.
Impact
- Full WCAG 2.1 accessibility compliance achieved across all components
- Complete elimination of flaky CI tests that were blocking deployments
- Zero runtime type errors from polymorphic component usage in production
- Accelerated development velocity across product teams through reliable, tested components
- Reduced legal risk through accessibility compliance protecting enterprise sales
- Improved developer experience through type-safe APIs with accurate IntelliSense
Why This Matters
Building a component library for an enterprise platform requires creating infrastructure that enables dozens of engineers to ship reliable software at scale. Every fix to a flaky test unblocks deployments. Every accessibility improvement protects end users and enterprise contracts. Every type-safe API prevents a production incident.
This work sits at the intersection of deep technical expertise and business impact — delivering foundational infrastructure that compounds in value as the platform grows.