Mealie Meal Plan Sync or Import Button

[sudokernelpanic]

Yuvomi does a good job showing the recipes from mealie, but it would be nice if there was a button to 'import' or 'sync' the meal plan you have in mealie for the week.

I would say call it more of a 'import' than a 'sync' since once the meals are in Yuvomi it should be owned by Yuvomi, if you want to swap meals or what not it wouldn't keep syncing and putting it back to the mealie meal plan.

I use mealie for creating my meal plans for the week as it's easier to navigate with it's filters and tags, and has meal plan rules for auto generating meals based on if/else statements. I don't think Yuvomi should re-creating these features as your just re-creating a feature that's already a thing in another program. I guess you would just have to figure out at what point is it mealies job and not Yuvomi's.

It would just be nice to not have to create the meal plan in mealie, then re-creating it manually again in Yuvomi.

[ulsklyc]

Thanks for writing this up, and for drawing the line yourself: import, not sync, and Mealie keeps its planning rules. That matches how the recipe side already works.

What exists today:

• The Mealie connection mirrors recipes only, read-only. It reads Mealie's recipe list and each recipe's details, hourly or on demand, and nothing else. Mealie's meal plans are never read, and there is no import for meal plans from Mealie, Tandoor or any other source.
• Mirrored recipes can be planned in Yuvomi like native ones (drag from the recipe sidebar, "Add to meal plan", the week randomizer), but only by hand.
• The API can already write a whole plan in one call: POST /api/v1/meals/apply-plan takes a list of { date, meal_type, title, notes?, recipe_url?, recipe_id? } and creates them in one transaction; with replace_existing: true it first removes what is already planned in those slots. Meal types are breakfast, lunch, dinner, snack. An API token with only the meals scope can be created under Settings -> Administration -> API access. So a small script that reads Mealie's meal plan and posts it to Yuvomi works against today's release, without any change to Yuvomi. Mapping a Mealie recipe to the mirrored copy works through the recipe list (GET /api/v1/recipes), where mirrored recipes carry Mealie's recipe id. That field is not part of the documented API yet, so a script should not rely on it long term.

What a built-in import would need:

• A new optional capability in the recipe provider adapters: read the provider's meal plan for a date range. Today the adapters only know recipes.
• A mapping from Mealie's entry types to Yuvomi's four slots, and a decision for entries Mealie has that Yuvomi does not (for example sides, or entries that are only a note without a recipe).
• Linking each entry to the mirrored copy of its recipe, and a fallback when that recipe has not been mirrored yet.
• A button in the meal planner ("Import this week from Mealie") that copies once, after which the meals belong to Yuvomi, as you describe. No write-back to Mealie.

I have not decided yet whether or when this gets built. The one-way shape you describe is the easier one to reason about, though: Mealie is already a read-only source here.

One question that decides a lot of the design: when you import a week that already has meals planned in Yuvomi, should the import add Mealie's entries next to them, replace only the days Mealie has entries for, or replace the whole week?

[whilenotsatisfied]

After thinking about it a bit, I think the best route would be to only add the mealie entries where yuvomi does not have anything planned. This solves a few things as follows:

1. Fills in the blanks on yuvomi meals for the week. So some custom meals and mealie meals can coexist.

2. Guards against accidental import over writing if you already imported the full week mealie plan, but then moved some meals around in yuvomi.

[sudokernelpanic]

Yes, I agree with @whilenotsatisfied

[ulsklyc]

Thanks, both of you. That settles it: the import fills empty slots only. A slot that already has a meal in Yuvomi is skipped, so your own meals and Mealie's can sit side by side, and importing the same week a second time does not undo what you moved around in the meantime.

I have written it up as #1411, with the open design points and my recommendation for each (where the button lives, how Mealie's entry types map onto Yuvomi's four slots, what happens to entries without a mirrored recipe). The first step is a skip_occupied option on POST /api/v1/meals/apply-plan, so the built-in import and any script you write in the meantime follow the same rule.

It is planned after the next release, not in it. Further input on the design points is welcome on #1411.