Quite often applications are built to be the only gate to its data. Business requirements change all the time, and when the app cannot adapt to a new workflow, or for other reasons becomes obsolete, it's a bottleneck.

Read-only access to the data is still essential for the business, but they cannot justify keeping, maintaining the app.

A possible solution is to replace the complex data-creator app with a simple, thin, data-access app.

The approach I'm sketching here is based on experience from multiple projects. Also, some projects were so massive that we had to work with vastly diverse data. These circumstances pushed us to think generic.

Let me explain this through example use cases.