Before I begin, I want to say I am very new to this and I am a junior but also solo developer with no seniors to ask for guidance. Please feel free to explain to me that I am not approaching it correctly or that there are better ways to do it. I am not familiar with all the methods out there or best practices.

I am building an application with a Python/Flask backend and the client side is a react application. Part of the app’s functionality is for a user to select certain “methods” each method corresponds to certain documents that I then need to concatenate together and serve to the client.

The concatenation happens on the backend. I could make the list of documents on the client side and send that to the server side, but I would prefer to just send user input (list of jobs) to the server and let the server come up with a list of documents and then do the rest as well. The only reason I am considering the first option is because the application will also have an option for users to manually select documents and add them to the list.

I see some problems surrounding maintaining and updating as the list of documents could potentially change. Having that on the client side could be problematic, would the best way to do this be to have maybe some structured file on the backend for the backend python app to reference which documents correspond to which methods in what quantity? I feel this will make updating so much easier if changes ever need to be made.