DCTAP

rudof supports DCTAP (Dublin Core Tabular Application Profiles).

DCTAP is a simple tabular template that can be used to describe application profiles.

As an example, the following example represents 2 shapes: Person and Company. Each row in DCTAP can contain a statement template that describes a property of that shape and some constraints. For example, the shape Person has 4 templates about the properties name, birthDate, knows and gender.

rudof supports DCTAP files in both CSV format and Excel spreadsheets.

Assuming the previous table is represented in a person.csv file as this one:

shapeId,propertyId,valueShape, valueDatatype, valueConstraint, mandatory, repeatable
Person,name,,xsd:string,,true,false
,birthDate,,xsd:date,,false,false
,gender,,,male female other,false,false
,knows, Person,,,false,true
,worksFor, Company,,,false,true
,,,,
Company,founder, Person,,,false,false

The following command can process the file and represent the shapes that it contains:

❯ rudof dctap -s user.csv
Shape(Person)  
 name xsd:string 
 birthDate xsd:date ?
 gender [male female other]?
 knows @Person *
 worksFor @Company *
Shape(Company)  
 founder @Person ?

Apart of CSV, rudof can also directly process files in spreadsheet formats like xlsx, assuming the previous table is stored in a file user.xlsx, it can be processed as:

❯ rudof dctap -s user.xlsx -f xlsx

DCTAP command

The general format of the DCTAP subcommand is:

❯ rudof dctap --help
Show information and process DCTAP files

Usage: rudof dctap [OPTIONS] --source-file <DCTap source file>

Options:
  -s, --source-file <DCTap source file>
          
  -f, --format <DCTap file format>
          [default: csv] [possible values: csv, xlsx, xlsb, xlsm, xls]
  -r, --result-format <Ouput results format>
          [default: internal] [possible values: internal, json]
  -c, --config-file <Config file name>
          Config file path, if unset it assumes default config
  -o, --output-file <Output file name, default = terminal>
          
      --force-overwrite
          
  -h, --help
          Print help

DCTAP Configuration file

The parameter --config-file (-c in short form) can be used to pass a configuration file in YAML format.

The fields that it can contain are:

• delimiter: field delimiter to use when parsing CSV. The default value is ,. Another typical value is ;.
• quote: The quote character to use when parsing CSV. The default is ". It can be used to indicate single quotes instead of double quotes.
• flexible: a boolean value that indicates if the number of fields in records is allowed to change or not. When disabled, parsing CSV data will return an error if a record is found with a number of fields different from the number of fields in a previous record. It is enabled by default.
• picklist_delimiter: character that is used to separate values in a picklist cell. The default value is a bar |.

The following fields are experimental and may be changed:

• property_placeholders: Table that can be used to generate values for some keys. When the processor finds a cell with some of those keys, it generates a value according to the placeholder resolver indicated. At this moment, rudof supports the placeholder resolver !Stem which means that it will replace the key by the corresponding stem value. For example, if the property placeholder has the entry x with the placeholder resolver of type !Stem and the value stem: "Pending", when a cell contains x:User, the generated value will be: pending:User.
• empty_property_placeholder: Indicates how to generate aa value for a row whose property ID is empty. The value is a placeholder resolver similar to the values in property_placeholders.

The following YAML file can be an example:

dctap:
  delimiter: ','
  picklist_delimiter: ' '
  property_placeholders:
    x: !Stem
      stem: "pending:"
  empty_property_placeholder:
    stem: "empty:"