Revision as of 00:11, 7 January 2014

First, we'll build a very simple personality, and we'll gradually extend it to better demonstrate how Crawler works.

The basis of nearly all document conversion personalities is the ViewExporter adapter.

The ViewExporter is a complex adapter. Basically, it connects two 'main' sub-adapters: a disassembler (which breaks a document granule into smaller granules) and an assembler (which takes the granules coming out of the disassembler, and builds the desired end-result).

The disassembler is part of the default Crawler setup. When running Crawler, the ViewExporter will ask the currently active application to provide it with an appropriate disassembler, and it will then use that disassembler in the ViewExporter.

The disassembler gets further configuration through the configuration files.

Adjusting The Top-Level config.ini

First, we'll enhance the top-level configuration file so it knows about the new personality we're going to build.

Let's call the personality 'tutorial'.

Change the top-level config.ini (i.e. the config.ini which resides next to Export.jsxbin). Initially it it looks similar to this (I've omitted most comments for brevity).

[conditionals]

selectors = text

[main]

personalityConfig?text = "./Personalities/Text/config.ini"

# ********************************************************************************

[debug]

debugMonitoring = false
logLevel = 0

Change it so it becomes like this:

[conditionals]

selectors = tutorial

[main]

personalityConfig?tutorial = "./Personalities/Tutorial/config.ini"
personalityConfig?text = "./Personalities/Text/config.ini"

# ********************************************************************************

[debug]

debugMonitoring = true
monitorAdapters = inputSplitter

logLevel = 5
logFileName = Crawler.log

This tells Crawler that we want to select 'tutorial', and it also says that the personalityConfig entry needs to be the lower-level config.ini inside the Tutorial folder inside the Personalities folder.

We also switch on debug monitoring, and hook a Debug Monitor into the inputSplitter adapter inside the ViewExporter.

Creating A Tutorial Personality

The next step is to make a start building the new personality.

Open the Personalities folder, and create a new subfolder called Tutorial. Inside that subfolder, create a text file called config.ini.

Put the following text in this personality-level config.ini file:

[main]

views = tutorialView

nesting = document/text.story

[main:tutorialView]

fileSplitLevel = document
xmlEncode = 0
accepted = document, text.story

[flush:tutorialView]

document = text.story

View

With this config file, we tell the ViewExporter that we only need a single view, named tutorialView.

Disassembly Hierarchy

We'll be processing InDesign documents, which have a 'natural' hierarchy: documents contain stories, stories contain paragraphs, paragraphs contain text runs, text runs contain words.

(Remark: this is not the only hierarchy we could use in InDesign documents. An alternate hierarchy would be documents contain spreads, spreads contain text frames, text frames contain text runs, text runs contain words. This alternate hierarchy does not 'map' onto the first hierarchy: text frames do not map cleanly onto paragraph boundaries or vice versa.)

In this case, we're initially interested in getting the text, and we don't care too much about the lower level granules, so all we tell the disassembler is:

nesting = document/text.story.

This tells the disassembler: if you see a document granule, please disassemble it into text.story granules.

When presented with a document granule, the disassembler will spit out a few story granules, followed by the original document granule.

Later on, we'll tell the disassembler to dig deeper than that.

Class Identifier Shorthand

The nesting entry is a slash-separated list of class identifiers. The expression

[main]
...
nesting = document/text.story
...

is actually shorthand for:

[main]
...
nesting = com.rorohiko.granule.document/com.rorohiko.granule.text.story
...

because Crawler allows granule class identifiers to be shortened by dropping the com.rorohiko.granule. prefix.

File Split Level

The [main:tutorialView] section gives the ViewExporter some info on the desired view.

It tells the ViewExporter that we want a fileSplitLevel = document.

As with the nesting, this is shorthand for fileSplitLevel = com.rorohiko.granule.document.

This instructs the ViewExporter that we want a separate output file for each input document.

If we were to use our tutorial personality to process an InDesign book file, we'd end up with a separate output file for each of the InDesign files in the book file.

By tweaking the fileSplitLevel, we could ask for a single output file for the whole book, or we ask to get a separate output file per individual story.

Log Output

Our rudimentary personality is not complete yet, but we can already try to run it. We won't get any meaningful output just yet, but we've configured a debug monitor, and a log file, so we'll see some useful information there.

If you run the Export.jsxbin script on an InDesign document, you'll get something like this in the Crawler.log file that should appear next to the Export.jsxbin file:

Mon Dec 30 2013 18:02:18 GMT+1300: Error: OutputTextFile.prototype.dumpData_protected_: needs file
Mon Dec 30 2013 18:02:18 GMT+1300: Note : ViewSplitter 'inputSplitter' input log:
**************************
InDesignStoryGranule [Facesti quo tet, offictation reculpa ritiand icatum doles maios re ...]

InDesignStoryGranule [Pudipsunt alitionet que labo. Liquo cor rerundelento eos et apiet  ...]

InDesignDocumentGranule [TutorialTest.indd]

**************************

Mon Dec 30 2013 18:02:18 GMT+1300: Error: OutputTextFile.prototype.dumpData_protected_: needs file

We can see the OutputTextFile adapter is unhappy (Error: OutputTextFile.prototype.dumpData_protected_: needs file) because it does not know where it needs to send its output. We'll fix that soon.

The area of interest are the granules that ran through the adapter network: we can see had two story granules, followed by a document granule.

Getting the text into a file

We'll now modify the personality-level config.ini a little bit so the text gets dumped into a file.

The sub-adapters used in the ViewExporter in Crawler look at a number of predefined context variables to determine what to do. One of these many predefined variables is called FILEPATH.

The OutputTextFile adapter will query the context for a variable called FILEPATH. If this variable is defined and contains a path to a file, then it the OutputTextFile adapter will dump its output into that file.

We can set the FILEPATH variable in the 'global' app context for the application by means of the personality-level config.ini file.

Contexts are arranged in a hierarchy; the 'topmost' context is the app context which we can influence from the config.ini file.

Change the config.ini in the Tutorial directory so it becomes:

[main]

views = tutorialView

nesting = document/text.story

[appContextData]

FILEPATH = ~/Desktop/output.txt

[main:tutorialView]

fileSplitLevel = document
xmlEncode = 0
accepted = document, text.story

[flush:tutorialView]

document = text.story

The added entry FILEPATH = ... in the [appContextData] section defines a context variable FILEPATH.

This value is picked up by the OutputTextFile adapter inside the ViewExporter.

Run the Export.jsxbin again.

You should now end up with a file called output.txt on the desktop. This file will contain all the text extracted from the InDesign document.