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PACKAGE

mykomap - A web application for mapping initiatives in the Solidarity & Co-operative Economies

Status

Service: master dev
Testing: npm test master npm test dev

USAGE

(Also prerequisites section below)

This package is designed to supply the basic source and web assets for a Digital Commons map website. This is tailored for a particular case by a configuration file, and an about.html page, supplied by the consumer site package.

The consumer package should supply a run-script target to build itself, as in the example below, which uses the mykomap-site-build script exported by this package.

  "scripts": {
    "build": "mykomap-site-build -c config -m -s src node_modules/mykomap -d build src/*",
    "deploy": "mykomap-site-deploy",
    "server": "php -t build/out -S localhost:8080"
  },

Additionally, this illustrates two other suggested run-scripts: deploy and server.

The server run-script illustrates how to run a web server for testing the site without deploying, for development. It uses the command-line PHP executable's facility to launch a web server. (Remember to build the site before running this.)

The deploy run-script illustrates how to deploy the web site to a remote location. It uses the mykomap-site-deploy script, which internally uses rsync. (Again, remember to build first.)

Given these, basic usage of a consuming NPM package therefore would look like this:

npm install         # Download the dependencies
npm run build       # Build and minify the source into builds/out
npm run server      # Launch a development web server on http://localhost:8080

And to deploy it, either configure a target specific to your package, which in this example is called mypackage:

npm config set mypackage:deploy_to=joe@example.com:/some/path
npm run deploy

Or, you can override any configured values via the command line like this:

npm run deploy -- -f some/where -t joe@example.com:/some/path

This is to support scripting the deploy step. See the inline documentation within mykomap-site-deploy for further details.

See DEVELOPMENT.md for more information about building and deploying mykomap websites during development of mykomap.

PREREQUISITES

Besides a modern version of NPM and NodeJS, this package needs the following command line tools:

  • bash - or possibly any Bourne-shell compatible shell (untested)
  • rsync - a file transfer utility
  • php - the command-line version of PHP

Additionally, the PHP curl module needs to be installed.

On Debian and related distros, Bash comes by default, and you can install the others with:

apt install rsync php-cli php-curl

On Windows 10 and above, you can install these via the Windows Subsystem for Linux.

NPM toolchain prerequisites are listed in package.json and installed with npm install.

CONSUMING PACKAGE REQUIREMENTS

These need to have a configuration directory containing:

  • about.html - containing mark-up which will be displayed on the about tab in the sidebar
  • config.json - configuration parameters, see beloow
  • <dataset>/ - a directory for each dataset named in the config, containing parameters for the SPARQL query to send to Virtuoso (these will be url-encoded):
    • query.rq - the query parameter to pass
    • default-graph-uri.txt - the default-graph-uri parameter to pass
    • endpoint.txt - the base URL to the Virtuoso server

The NPM mykomap package needs to be a dependency, which exports the mykomap-site-build script.

The package needs to invoke it like this(typically as an npm build script target):

mykomap-site-build -c config -s src -m node_modules/mykomap  -d build src/*

Where:

  • config is the path to the configuration directory mentioned above
  • src is an optional path to a custom entry point (index.ts or index.js) and related source code
  • node_modules/mykomap is the path to the mykomap package directory
  • build is the directory in which to build the site
  • src/* expands to a list of directories to include in the build

build will be populated with two directories:

  • in - which contains a RequireJS build.js script and the assets it needs (linked from eleewhere)
  • out - the generated site content

build/out can then be served by a (PHP enabled) web server directly, or packaged for deployment.

CONFIG.JSON

This JSON file defines the defaults for a mykomap. Put in at the path config/config.json within the NPM project consuming mykomap (relative to package.json). Note, because it is JSON, comments are not allowed and all keys must be delimited by double-quotes. Double quotes are the only string delimiter.

The valid configuration attributes defined in CONFIG.md. This is regenerated automatically from the config schema defined in src/map-app/app/model/config.js) by running the generate-config-doc NPM run script. Run this whenever the config changes.

OVERRIDING CONFIG.JSON ATTRIBUTES

Some of these may be tweaked in various ways, to allow users of the library some flexibility, as follows. Methods are listed in order of increasing priority - if the parameter is defined different ways, the latter override the former.

Only those attributes which are settable (as defined in CONFIG.md) can be overridden. When being set from a context which can only supply string values, these are parsed into a valid value.

In the <div id="map-app"> element

For example, you can define the div like this to override values:

<div id="map-app"
     map-app:html-title="My Title"
     map-app:initial-bounds="40.712,-74.227,40.774,-74.125" 
>
</div>

Here, a config attribute name like initialBounds should be defined as map-app:initial-bounds. There's a namespace prefix to make sure there can't be clashes with existing HTML attributes. Also, hyphenation is used instead of capitalisation. The reason for this is that HTML elements' attributes are case-insensitive. The case can't be accessed from Javascript because they effectively get downcased before Javascript even sees them.

In URL query parameters.

For example, you can load the webpage containing the div with ID map-app with query parameters like this:

http://example.com/map?initialBounds=40.712,-74.227,40.774,-74.125

You'll need URL escaping where necessary: a space should be denoted with a +, a question mark with %3B, etc. You can use the Javascript built-in function encodeURIComponent to do this. Multiple parameters should be delimited by ampersands or semi-colons, as usual.

(Note, these parameters are parsed on the client-side in the Javascript, so no extra PHP or Apache scripts needed for it to work.)

The upshot of this is that you can embed the map hosted on (say) server1.example.com in a page on server2.example.com using an iframe element in a web page on the latter referring to the former. The element should set the configuration paramters in the URL as above. So a super simple example might be:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head><!-- ... --></head>
  <body>
    Blah blah

    <iframe src="https://server1.example.com/index.html?initialBounds=40.712,-74.227,40.774,-74.125"></iframe>
  </body>
</html>

This example omits all styling and layout, etc., which is out of the scope of this document.

(Note that setting the parent page's title using the htmlTitle parameter won't work in this context, however, since the title of the page inside the iframe isn't visible to the user.)

If you wish to adjust the initial position of the map using the initialBounds paramter, here is a rough guide to finding the correct coordinates.

  • Visit https://openstreetmap.org,
  • Navigate so that the position of one of the corners of the initial bounds is in view.
  • Right-click on the exact location, and
  • A pop-up menu appears. Select 'Show address'.
  • A side-bar should open showing the latitiude and longitude coordinates of this point.
  • Record this, and repeat for the opposite corner.
  • Concatenate these numbers with commas, like this: <lat1>,<long1>,<lat2>,<long2>
  • Use this as the initialBounds parameter value

In code

If the map-app init() function defined in app/main.js is called directly, a object defining config attributes can be supplied as the first parameter. From HTML, for example:

<script src="lib/require.js"></script>
<script type="application/javascript">

require(['app/main'], function(main) {
    main.init({
        initialBounds: [[40.712,-74.227],[40.774,-74.125]],
        htmlTitle: "My Title",
    });
});

</script>

Note, this actually bypasses any HTML attribute or URL parsing, so if you use this method these won't happen at all. Typically you won't be doing this, as it requires understanding of RequireJS.

DEVELOPMENT

Developing mykomap needs a way to deploy a website using it for testing. Doing this via a dependency from (say) the mykomap-site-example project to mykomap is a bit cumbersome if changes to mykomap need to be propagated back to the consuming project via pushing the changes under test to github.

It is also possible to change a package.json dependency on mykomap to a relative path. But this also doesn't work well, because

  1. This change mustn't be checked in, but more seriously
  2. It doesn't then pull in the RequireJS dependency correctly.

The latter seems to be a known problem with npm.

So, a suggested simpler way is to embed a simple project using mykomap within a subdirectory ext, either directly (from within the same directory as this README):

git clone $PROJECT_URL ext

Or using a symlink:

ln -sf $PROJECT_PATH ext

A pair of npm script tasks to build and serve that directly have been added to package.json, so given the above, you can the build and serve the project like this:

npm install    # installs mykomap deps
npm run build  # builds the embedded project in ext/build/out/
npm run server  # serves the embedded project in ext/build/out/

The website, using the under-development version of mykomap, will then be accessible locally via the URL http://localhost:8080

Caveat: the embedded project should not have any extra dependencies beyond mykomap, because the npm install above will not find those.

SCRIPT TARGETS

This package does little in its own right. The following are the script targets it supports.

npm lint

Runs a static analysis of the source, highlighting possible improvements

npm build

Assuming a project consuming mykomap (such as mykomap-site-example)has been symlinked (or installed) into ext/, this builds that dependent project. Primarily for the mykomap developers' convenience, rather than any users of mykomap.

npm server

As above, a mykomap developers' convenience. Launches a PHP development web-server, publishing a project consuming mykomap in ext/

npm generate-config-doc

Developer convenience. Regenerates the documentation for config.json in CONFIG.md. Developers should run this when the schema definitions in config-schema.ts are changed.

MISCELLANEA

Information which doesn't quite fit in anywhere above.

Tips for identifying deployed mykomap parameters

Sometimes you might want to see just what version a mykomap deployment is, which datasets it is using, or what the SPARQL query is.

Even if this isn't possible to infer from the map, the mykomap configuration resources (described above) can be inspected in a browser.

The following files will be present, at least, and possibly more with .rq suffixes, defining other queries.

  • about.html
  • config.json
  • <dataset>/
    • query.rq
    • default-graph-uri.txt
    • endpoint.txt

The name of the folder <dataset> is up to you, its contents may include additional files, and you may have more than one folder. If the web server does not show file indexes, you will need to know the names of these in advance.

Strictly, the location of these resources is defined relative to the map-app.js source code. So using dotcoop.solidarityeconomy.coop as an example deployment, if the map-app.js file is published here:

https://dotcoop.solidarityeconomy.coop/map-app/map-app.js

...Then the configuration is published in an adjacent directory configuration. (Note that the word "configuration" is not abbreviated here, as it is in the source code directory above.)

Specifically, config.json will be here:

https://dotcoop.solidarityeconomy.coop/configuration/config.json

So if your app deploys mykomap code like the example, you can append configuration/config.json to the default map URL to find config.json and the other resources. Like this:

Pre mykomap versions of the map app

Note that before the map-app was converted into this NPM package, the configuration was located in a slightly different path relative to map-app/map-app.js. For example, at the time of writing the Oxford map predates mykomap and the configuration can be found here (and the other files in their respective relative locations):

https://oxford.solidarityeconomy.coop/map-app/configuration/config.json

The location was changed to permit separation of the source code from the configuration files.