sddgen 0.0.3

A package a consice description of structured data

Structured data description and generation

About the package

This package allows consice descriptions of structured data. It allows one to embed tags and options to each node of the tree-like structure which are interpreted by the application. Tags and options are embeded in the keys when written in JSON and YAML formats, while they are specified as attributes in the XML format.

Motivation

This package defines a simple text format to describe structured data. The motivation comes from describing the document layouts of various forms, creating hierarchical geometric models etc. The idea is similar to HTML semantics, keeping the structure and meaning of various elements clear while describing their styles by CSS. In case of hierarchical geometric models, the description of the model structure and the configuration of each geometric object can be separated.

Specification

The description is has 3 parts:

• Structure
  • This part describes the structure of the document or the system.
  • The basic element composing the entire structure is called an element which has a name and an associated type.
  • The name and type of an element are described as the key in the Yaml file like "name[options]{tags}".
• Components
  • A component is meant to define a type, similar to a class in object-oriented programming languages.
  • This part contains components which can be reused as part of the structure.
• Configuration
  • The configuration (style) of each component or element is specified here.
  • A component can be specified by its name, while an element can be specified as C1.e1 for an element e1 which is a child of component C1.

The basic format is Yaml. There is a header section in the Yaml file where one can modify the above Structure/components/configuration keys like

header:
  structureKey: documnent
  componentsKey: components
  configurationKey: styles
  target: HTML+CSS
  
documennt[Page]: ~

components: ~

styles: ~
  Page:
    color: navy

Usage

This package only specifies the format to describe structured data. How the contents are used is left to the application. As the original motivation was to describe the page layout or hierachical data, some derived outputs may be produced from these descriptions. There are several forseen targets as listed below.

Target	Description
Tkinter	Tkinter GUI layout
HTML+CSS	HTML+CSS files
Cgeom	Geometry package (private)