Validata is an intuitive, standalone web-based tool to help building RDF documents by validating against preset schemas written in the Shape Expressions (ShEx) language..
All functionality is implemented client-side, so it can be deployed in any web hosting environment with any web server which can serve static files.
The actual validation task is performed by code from the ShEx-validator project. The Node.js module from that project is then packaged for client-side usage using browserify, as detailed below.
- Node.js / NPM
- Bower
Installing Node.js (which includes the npm package manager) is easy on Windows and Mac with the https://nodejs.org installer.
On Linux we would recommend installing it using your distribution's package manager, however if it is not in the standard repositories you should follow these instructions (only a couple of commands for most distros) to install: https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/Installing-Node.js-via-package-manager
After installing Node.js, make sure you have the latest version of npm by telling it to update itself:
sudo npm install npm -g
Once you have NPM installed, install bower globally:
npm install -g bower
Bower is a very handy package manager, better equipped for front end web development than NPM alone: http://bower.io
Clone the repository to a new folder. The static web application will be served from the "public" subfolder of this folder.
git clone https://github.com/HW-SWeL/Validata.git
Move into the project folder and update NPM packages and Bower packages:
cd Validata
npm install
bower install
To deploy a Validata instance place the files in a folder in your web server.
Congratulations, your Validata deployment should now be up and running!
Next, you might want to create a custom configuration for your deployment of Validata, with your own schemas and demo data etc.
To do this, load up your deployed web application with /admin appended to the root URL to access the Validata admin application. This is a simple tool designed to help you generate a JSON configuration file for the main Validata deployment.
You can either start by uploading/importing the default config file from /public/javascripts/ValidataConfig.json, or you can start creating your own from scratch by adding a schema.
Hopefully the admin generator is fairly self-explanatory - once you are finished, click Download File to save your new ValidataConfig.json configuration file. Then, upload this file to the /public/javascripts folder of your deployment location, overwriting the existing configuration file, and your new settings will immediately be live.
If something is not working right or is not explained well enough above, please feel free to post an issue on the GitHub project issue tracker!
Any time the ShEx-validator code is modified in /node_modules/ShEx-validator (by either modifying it directly for testing, or by committing to the ShEx-validator project and running npm update in your Validata root, you'll need to re-browserify your packaged version of it.
This requires that browserify is deployed, which can be done with the following command
npm install -g browserify
The latest version of the ShEx-validator validation library can be packaged into a client-side javascript file using browserify:
browserify public/javascripts/ShExValidator-browserify.js -o public/javascripts/ShExValidator.js
To see the state of migration of the code to the new shex.js library, clone the test branch, the instructions are all the same as the test branch pulls the test branch of ShEx-Validator package