orsa-dom v0.0.1

Orsa DOM

The Orsa DOM is the central element of the Orsa system. It's the reason that folks use Orsa.

The Orsa DOM system includes these classes:

Important methods

Elements support these accessor and methods:

Persisted Attributes

Persisted attributes are metadata values that are so critical to the function of the system that they are promoted out of the metadata and onto the DOM element itself as direct attributes. For Project nodes this includes; name, localPath and version. For File node type includes; localPath, relativePath, name and mimeType.

Metadata

Metadata is a critical part of the DOM, it's where plugins store everything they learn about a file or a project. Metadata supports two methods set and get:

Metadata key names

Critical Note: Control your key names for metadata! Do not use user-generated data for key names. User generated data can contain special characters like . or / that can mess up downstream systems.

Instead of doing something like this:

const myModuleName = 'lodash.get';
const versions = {};
versions[myModuleName] = '0.0.1'; // This is bad
domElement.metadata.set('moduleVersions', versions);

Instead do:

const myModuleName = 'lodash.get';
const versions = [];
versions.push({
  name: myModuleName,
  version: '0.0.1',
});
domElement.metadata.set('moduleVersions', versions);

set(key, value, options)

Sets a key on metadata structure. The key is in lodash's set format. options only supports one option at the moment, which is temporary. If temporary is set then the data is not output during save/restore or in toObject(). This is handy when you have big transient structures, like the AST, which are handy during processing, but which should not be stored.

Here is an example set:

domElement.metadata.set('foo.bar.baz', 15);

This would result in:

foo: {
  bar: {
    baz: 15,
  },
},

In the toObject() output.

Here is an example of a set of a temporary value:

domElement.metadata.set('foo.bar.baz', 15, {
  temporary: true,
});

This key would not be output from toObject().

get(key, value)

Gets a key from a metadata structure. The key is in lodash's get format.

Here is an example get:

domElement.metadata.get('foo.bar.baz');

Children

Subclasses of Element support children. You can add a child this way:

const realNewElement = domElement.children.add(newElement);

A really important note when it comes to adding a child is the merging behavior (described below). That's why the expression above says realNewElement is the output of add. When you add an element it's possible that instead of being added it will be merged with an existing element. In either case the realNewElement is the element you should use from that point until the end of your plugins interaction with the element.

You can access the set children on an element this way:

domElement.children.toArray();

Children Merging

If you are writing a plugin that adds elements to the DOM, for example a project or file scanner, then you will invariably want to handle the "add only if it's not already there" use case. Well, good on yah, but you don't need to do that. The RootElement and Project elements are pre-set so that if you add an element that has the same persisted attributes as another child that is already there then your new element is merged with the original.

Other classes

This package also includes ElementSet, which manages the children array of Elements, MetaData which manages the metadata object, and RootElement which handles creating elements by type name when saving and restoring the DOM.