Revision as of 03:31, 28 December 2013

An exporter is an atomic adapter.

A personality in the Crawler system can be built around an exporter. It is not a requirement to do so, but using an exporter can make things easier by providing some useful pre-made functionality.

Parent-child personalities

The exporter is a high-level adapter which coordinates parent-child relations between personalities.

It is possible to create a new personality by tweaking an existing personality. This is achieved by overriding certain settings or adding to the existing settings in the configuration files.

This 'personality-inheritance' mechanism is handled by the exporter adapter. For example, if the default XHTML/CSS personality almost fits the bill, it's possible to derive a new personality from it, and enhance or change the way the derived personality behaves.

Debug Monitors

A second function of the exporter is to manage the injection of debug monitors into the adapter network. The exporter reads the top-level configuration file to determine which named adapters need to be monitored, and it will dynamically add the necessary debug monitors to the adapter network.

View Exporter

In many cases, personalities are built around a view exporter,a specialized exporter which supports multiple views.

Views are alternate data flows.

For example, an InDesign-to-XHTML/CSS conversion will use two separate views: an XHTML view and a CSS view.

The document will first be disassembled by a set of disassemblers, and the resulting output data flow will be duplicated into two separate data flows by means of an input splitter.

One of the two data flows will be routed through the XHTML view, the other through the CSS view. The end result will be two separate data files: one file produced by the XHTML view, the other will be produced by the CSS view. Both files will be based on the same input data, but they will go through separate construction mechanisms.