OpenUI Specification

This repository contains a technology-independent specification for a Web UI framework. It also includes an Angular TypeScript generator that applies a UI description authored against the spec to an existing Angular workspace. The goal is to use the specification as the basis for a standard.

• Using the specification — read the published docs on ReadTheDocs: https://openui-spec.readthedocs.io/

Developer docs

Contributor and developer entry points for this repository:

• Contributing guide — repository map, local setup and validation.
• Releasing — version rules, release validation and publishing.
• Requirements — what the solution must provide.
• Changelog — release notes, breaking changes, and upgrade guidance.
• AGENTS.md — guidance for AI coding assistants.

OpenUI JSON packages

Both implementations bundle spec/openui.schema.json and spec/openui.json, and parse, model and validate documents with the same API and the same diagnostics. Validation runs the four stages of the conformance suite: grammar, document (globally unique ids and the spec version), catalog (every type is a known object type) and contract (every attribute value fits its declared value type).

Python

The openui-spec package requires Python 3.12 or newer and installs two command-line tools:

• openui_spec validates and edits documents with validate, add, remove, and modify commands.
• compare_openui_spec structurally compares two documents and emits a deterministic JSON changelog.

python -m pip install openui-spec
openui_spec validate --input document.json
openui_spec add --input document.json --parent root --object '{"id":"newTable","type":"Table"}'
compare_openui_spec reference.json updated.json --output changelog.json

The parse, model and validate API is the bin.openui_document module (parse, validate, validate_text, Document, Element, Attribute, Diagnostic).

TypeScript and Node.js

The @shlomoa/openui-spec package provides the typed OpenUiJson document API, the equivalent ng-openui-spec editing CLI, and the same parse, model and validate API as the Python package (parse, validate, validateText, Document, Element, Attribute, Diagnostic).

npm install @shlomoa/openui-spec

import { OpenUiJson } from "@shlomoa/openui-spec";

const document = OpenUiJson.load("input.json");
document.validate();
document.add("root", { id: "newTable", type: "Table" });
document.updateAttributes("newTable", { title: "Updated" });
document.save("output.json");

ng-openui-spec validate --input document.json

Essentials

• An OpenUI document is a tree with a root id of root; every node has a unique camelCase id and an exact, case-sensitive catalog type.
• Put non-hierarchical values in attrs and nested objects in children. An attribute key names its category, uses.<name>, produces.<name> or behaves.<name>, and its value is typed; see attributes and value types.
• Editing commands revalidate the result and update --input in place. Pass --output to preserve the source document.
• Values accepted by --object and --attrs can be inline JSON or paths to JSON files.

Documentation

• Specification outline and artifact model
• Glossary
• Conformance suite
• Interactive taxonomy tree
• Playground — paste a document, see its validation and element tree
• OpenUI JSON editing API and CLI reference
• OpenUI JSON comparison guide
• OpenUI document examples