This module is used by Collection-Raku-Documentation, but is intended to be more general, such as building a blog site.

Installation

zef install Collection

Usage

The Collection module expects there to be a config.raku file in the root of the collection, which provides information about how to obtain the content (Pod6/rakudoc> sources, a default Mode to render and output the collection. All the configuration, template, and plugin files described below are Raku programs that evaluate to a Hash. They are described in the documentation for the RakuConfig module.

A concrete example of Collection is the Collection-Raku-Documentation module.

The Collection module provides the infrastructure, whilst Collection-Raku-Documentation provides an example of a concrete configuration.

Archiving and Minor Changes

In principle, if a small change is made in a source file of a Collection, only the rendered version of that file should be changed, and the Collection pages (eg., the index and the glossaries) updated.

When there are many source files, the process of saving and restoring state information may be longer than actually rerendering all the cached files. Consequently, the option no-preserve-state prevents the archiving of processed state.

Life cycle of processing

After initialisation, which should only occur once, then the content files are processed in several stages separated by milestones. At each milestone, intermediary data can be reprocessed using plugins, the data after the plugins can be dumped, or the processed halted.

collect can be called with option flags, which have the same effect as configuration options. The run-time values of the Control flags take precedence over the configuration options.

collect should be called with a Mode. A Mode is the name of a set of configuration files, templates, and plugins that control the way the source files are processed and rendered. The main configuration file must contain a key called mode, which defines the default mode that collect uses if called with no explicit mode, so if collect is called without a Mode, the default will be used.

In Collection-Raku-Documentation Raku-Doc is an Command Line Interface for giving run time options to collect.

Milestones

The collect sub can be called once the collection directory contains a config.raku, which in turn contains the location of a directory of rakudoc source files, which must contain recursively at least one source.

The process of collecting, rendering and outputting the collection has a number of milestones. A milestone will have an inspection point, at which the intermediate data can be dumped without stopping the processing, eg.,

collect(:dump-at<post-cache render>);

or the processing can be stopped and the intermediate data inspected, eg.

my $rv = collect(:end<source>);

The end and dump-at option values are the (case-insensitive) name(s) of the inspection point for the milestone. Clearly, end only takes one name, but dump may take one or all of them (each separately specified).

A milestone may also be where plugins (aka call-backs) can be defined. Plugins are described in more detail in Plugin management.

The return value of collect at a milestone is the object provided to the plugins after all the plugins have been evaluated. The aim of this design is to give to developers the ability to test the effect of plugins at each stage on the object to be modified by the plugins.

The dump-at option calls pretty-dump or .raku [TODO pretty-dump, when it handles BagHash and classes] on the same objects as above and then outputs them to a file(s) called dump-at-<milestone name>.txt.

Processing occurs during a stage named by the milestone which starts it. Each stage is affected by a set of Control flags. Certain flags will be passed to the underlying objects, eg. RakuConfig and ProcessedPod (see Raku::Pod::Render.

The milestone name is the name of the inspection point, and the plugin type.

Zeroth

Since this is the start of the processing, no plugins are defined as there are no objects for them to operate on.

The config.raku file must exist and must contain a minimum set of keys. It may optionally contain keys for the control flags that control the stage, see below. The intent is to keep the options for the root configuration file as small as possible and only refer to the source files. Most other options are configured by the Mode.

During the subsequent Source stage, the source files in the collection are brought in, if the collection has not been fully initiated, using the source-obtain configaturation list. Alternatively, any updates are brought in using the source-refresh list. Commonly, sources will be in a git repository, which has separate commands for clone and pull. If the source-obtain and source-refresh options are not given (for example during a test), no changes will be made to the source directory.

Any changes to the source files are cached by default.

The control flags for the subsequent process are:

• no-status (default False)

  The compilation and caching of source files is slow, so a progress bar is provided by default. This is not useful when testing or batch processing, so :no-status prevents the progress bar.

• no-refresh (default False)

  Prevents source file updates from being brought in.

  An explicit configuration or run-time no-refresh = False is over-ridden by an explicit run-time or configuration without-processing = True.

• without-processing (default False)

  This option is used to skip every stage upto the Completion, for example starting the document server without checking for documentation updates or re-rendering templates.

• recompile

  Forces all the source files to be recompiled into the cache.

Source

At this milestone, the source files have been cached. The mode sub-directory has not been tested, and the configuration for the mode has not been used. Since plugin management is dependent on the mode configuration, no plugins can be called.

The return value of collect with inspection source inspection points is a single Pod::From::Cache object that does a Post-Cache role.

A Pod::From::Cache object provides a list of updated files, and a full set of source files. It will provide a list of Pod::Blocks contained in each content files, using the filename as the key.

A source plugin can associate a Pod::Block with a key, interpreted as a source filename. Thus the Pod lists can be processed, eg. looking for search keys, and new pod files can be created that can then be rendered. The filtering is done with the Pod-Cache role. For example,

for $cache.list-files {
    my $pod-tree = $cache.pod($_);
    # process pod-tree
    my Pod::Block $processed = something($pod-tree);
    $cache.add("$_\-processed", [ $processed ]); # must be an Array
    $cache.add($_); # omit this step if the unprocessed file is to be rendered
}

When pod is extracted from the cache in the rendering phase, the $_-processed files will be available, but the $_ files will return an undefined (False in Bool context) and not be rendered.

The next, Mode, stage is when the source files for the Mode are obtained, compiled and cached. The process is controlled by the same options as the Source stage.

If a sub-directory with the same name as mode does not exist, or there are no config files in the <mode>/config directory, collect will throw an X::Collection::NoMode exception during this stage.

Mode source files are stored under the mode sub-directory and cached there. If the mode source files are stored remotely and updated independently of the collection, then the mode-obtain and mode-refresh keys are used.

Setup

If setup plugins are defined and in the mode's plugins-required<setup> list, then the cache objects for the sources and the mode's sources (and the full-render value) are passed to the program defined by the plugin's setup key.

The purpose of this milestone is to allow for content files to be pre-processed, perhaps to creates several sub-files from one big file, or to combine files in some way, or to gather information for a search algorithm.

During the setup stage,

• the ProcessedPod object is prepared,

• templates specified in the templates directory are added

• the key mode-name is added to the ProcessedPod object's plugin-data area and given the value of the mode.

The Setup stage depends on the following options:

• no-status as before, turns off a progress bar

• without-processing skips the setup stage, unless the caches did not previously exist.

• full-render

  By default, only files that are changed are re-rendered, which includes an assumption that if any source file is changed, then all the mode sources must be re-rendered as well.

  When full-render is True, the output directory is emptied of content, forcing all files to be rendered.

  full-render may be combined with no-refresh, for example when templates or plugins are changed and the aim is to see what effect they have on exactly the same sources. In such a case, the cache will not be changed, but the cache object will not contain any files generated by setup plugins.

Render

At this milestone render plugins are supplied to the ProcessedPod object. New Pod::Blocks can be defined, and the templates associated with them can be created.

The source files (by default only those that have been changed) are rendered.

The stage is controlled by the same options as Setup. So, it can be skipped by setting without-processing.

Compilation

At this milestone plugins are provided to add compiled data to the ProcessedPod object, so that the sources in the mode's directory can function.

During the Render stage, the %processed hash is constructed whose keys are the filenames of the output files, and whose values are a hash of the page components of each page.

The compilation plugins could, eg, collect page component data (eg., Table of Contents, Glossaries, Footnotes), and write them into the ProcessedPod object separately so there is a TOC, Glossary, etc structure whose keys are filenames.

The return value of collect at the inspection point is a list of ProcessedPod, %process, with the ProcessedPod already changed by the compilation plugins.

Report

Once a collection has been rendered, all the links between files, and to outside targets can be subject to various tests. It is also possible to subject all the rendered files to tests. This is accomplished using report plugins.

In addition, all the plugins that have been used at each stage (except for the Report stage itself) are available.

The report stage is intended for testing the outputs and producing reports on the tests.

Completion

Once the collection has been tested, it can be activated. For example, a collection could be processed into a book, or a Cro App run that makes the rendered files available on a browser. This is done using completion plugins.

The no-completion option allows for the completion phase to be skipped.

Setting without-processing to True and no-completion to True should have no effect unless

• there are no caches, which will be the case the first time collect is run

• the destination directory is missing, which will be the case the first time collect is run

Note that the no-report option is False by default, and will take effect even if without-processing is True, but processing is forced because caches or destination directories are missing.

So this combination is useful to set up the collection and to get a report on the processing.

Cleanup

Cleanup comes after collect has finished, so is not a part of collect.

Currently, collect just returns with the value of the @plugins-used object.

Distribution Structure

A distribution contains content files, which may be updated on a regular basis, a cache, templates, extra assets referenced in a content file (such as images), and one or more modes.

Content

The content of the distribution is contained in POD6 files. In addition to the source files, there are Collection content files which express things like the Table of Contents for the whole collection.

Collection content are held separately to the source content, so that each mode may have different pages.

This allows for active search pages for a Website, not needed for an epub, or publisher data for an output formation that will be printed.

Extra assets (images, videos, etc)

Assets such as images, which are directly referenced in content file, but exist in different formats, eg, png, are held apart from content Pod6 files, but are processed with content files.

The reasoning for this design is that Pod6 files are compiled and cached in a manner that does not suit image files. But when an image file is processed for inclusion in a content file, the image may need to be processed by the template (eg., image effects specified in a Pod Block config).

The assets are all held in the same directory, specified by the configuration key asset-basenamme, but each asset may exist in subdirectories for each type of asset, specified by the asset-paths key.

(Asset files relating to the rendering of a content file, such as css, javascript, etc, are managed by plugins, see below for more on plugins.)

A class to manage asset files is added to the ProcessedPod object with a role, so the assets can be manipulated by plugins and templates. Assets that are in fact used by a Pod content file are marked as used. The aim of this functionality is to allow for report-stage plugins to detect whether all images have been used.

Plugins can also transform the assets, and create new files in the ProcessedPod object for inclusion in the output.

At the end of the compilation stage, all the assets that have been used are written to a directory specified in the Mode configuration file. It is the task of the template rendering block to ensure that the path where the asset is stored is the same as the path the final output (eg. the browser rendering html files) processor requests.

In keeping with the principle that collection level meta data is kept in the top-level config file, and output data is associated with the specific mode, there are two asset-path definitions.

• Collection level assets. The source of assets is kept in the top-level config.raku file. In order to have each asset in its own directory, the following is possible:

  ...
      :asset-basename<assets>,
      asset-paths => %(
          image => %(
              :directory<images>,
              :extensions<png jpeg jpeg svg>,
          ),
          video-clips => %(
              :directory<videos>,
              :extensions<mp4 webm>,
          ),
      ),
      ...
  

  Notice that the type, eg. image and video-clips above, are arbitrary and not dependent on the actual format.

• Output configuration. The output destination is kept in the mode configuration, eg., Website/configs/03-images.raku contains

  %(
          :asset-out-path<html/assets>
          ),
      )
  

  For more see Asset-cache methods

Cache

The cache is a Precomp structure into which the content files are pre-preprocessed.

Mode

The Mode is the collection of templates and configuration for some output.

The default Mode for Collection-Raku-Documentation is Website, for example.

The string defining mode must refer to an immediate directory of the root of the collection, so it is compared to / ^ \W+ (\w+) '/'? .* $ / and only the inner \w chars are used.

The templates, configuration, output files, and other assets used by a Mode are associated with the Mode, and should reside beneath the Mode sub-directory.

Templates

The templates, which may be any format (currently RakuClosure or Mustache) accepted by ProcessedPod, define how the following are expressed in the output:

• the elements of the content files, eg. paragraphs, headers

• the files as entities, eg, whether as single files, or chapters of a book

• the collective components of content files, viz, Table of Contents, footnotes, Glossary, Meta data

• All the templates may be in one file, or distributed between files.

• If there are no templates in the directory, the default files in ProcessedPod are used.

• If there are multiple files in the directory, they will all be evaluated in alphanumeric order. Note that existing keys will be over-written if they exist in later templates. This is not the same behaviour as for Configuration files.

Configuration

There are two levels of configuration. The top-level resides in config.raku in the root directory of the Collection. The collect sub will fail without this file.

Top level configuration

In the descriptions below, simple illustrative names are given to files with configuration, templates, callables. These files are generally Raku programs, which are compiled and run. They will almost certainly contain errors during development and the Rakudo compiler will provide information based on the filename. So it is good practice to name the files that make them easier to locate, such as prefixing them with the plugin name.

config.raku must contain the following keys:

• the cache directory, relative to the root directory of the collection

• Collection-Raku-Documentation default: 'doc-cache',

• the sources directory, relative to the root of the collection and must contain at least one content file

• Collection-Raku-Documentation default: 'raku-docs'

• mode is the default mode for the collection, and must be a sub-directory, which must exist and contain a configs sub-directory (note the plural ending).

• Collection-Raku-Documentation default: 'Website'

The following are optional keys, together with the defaults

• the allowed extensions for content files. These are provided to the Pod::From::Cache object.

• default: < rakudoc pod pod6 p6 pm pm6 >

• no-status This option controls whether a progress bar is provided in the terminal

• default: False

• source-obtain is the array of strings sent to the OS by run to obtain sources, eg git clone and assumes CWD is set to the directory of collection. Without this key, there must already be files in sources.

• default: ()

• source-refresh is the array of strings run to refresh the sources, assumes CWD set to the directory of sources. No key assumes the sources never change.

• default: ()

• ignore is a list of files in the sources directory that are not cached.

• default: ()

• no-status as described in Milestones

• default: False

• without-processing as described in Milestones

• default: False

• no-refresh as described in Milestones

• default: False

• recompile as described in Milestones

• default: False

Second-level configuration

The second-level configuration resides in one or more files that are under the configs/ sub-directory of the mode directory. This arrangement is used to allow for configuration to be separated into different named files for ease of management.

The following rules apply:

• If the configs directory for a mode does not exist or is empty, Raku-Doc (collect sub) will fail.

• The Configuration consists of one or more Raku files that each evaluate to a hash.

• Each Config file in the Configs directory will be evaluated in alphabetical order.

• Configuration keys may not be over-written. An X::RakuConfig::OverwriteKey exception will be thrown if an attempt is made to redefine a key.

All the following keys are mandatory. Where a key refers to a directory (path), it should normally be relative to the mode sub-directory.

• mode-sources location of the source files for the Collection pages, eg., TOC.

• mode-cache location of the cache files

• the templates subdirectory, which must contain raku files as described in ProcessedPod. These are all passed at the Render milestone directly to the ProcessedPod object.

• destination directory where the output files are rendered

• plugins is a string with the location of the plugins directory, either relative to root of the mode directory, or an absolute path. It is possible for the plugins directory to contain unused plugins. See Plugin management

• report-path is the path to which report plugins should output their reports.

• plugins-required points to a hash whose keys are milestone names where plugins can be applied

• setup a list of plugin names, see Plugin management, for pre-processing cache contents

• render plugins used to render Pod::Blocks

• compilation plugins prepare the ProcessedPod object for collection pages.

• report plugins to test and report on the rendering process

• completion plugins that define what happens after rendering

• cleanup plugins if cleanup is needed.

• landing-place is the name of the file that comes first during the completion stage. For example, in a Website, the landing file is usually called index.html

• output-ext is the extension for the output files

All optional control flags are False by default. They are:

• no-status

• recompile

• no-refresh

• full-render

• no-report

• without-processing

• no-preserved-state

• no-cache

• no-completion

• debug-when

• verbose-when

• no-code-escape

Control flags

The control flags are also covered in Milestones.

• no-status

  No progress status is output at any time.

• without-processing

  Setting without-processing to True will skip all the stages except Completion, so long as the destination directories exist.

• no-preserved-state

  In order to allow for changes in some source files, or in only mode files, after all the sources have been processed once, the processing state must be archived. This may not be needed in testing or if the archiving takes too long.

  Setting no-preserved-state = True prevents storage of state, but also forces without-processing to False, and recompile to True.

• recompile

  Controls the updating and caching of the content files. If true, then all files will be recompiled and cached.

  A True value is over-ridden by without-processing

  Normally False, which allows for only changed files to be processed.

• no-refresh

  Prevents the updating of content files, so no changes will be made.

• full-render

  Forces all files to be rendered. Even if there are no changes to source files, plugins or templates may be added/changed, thus changing the output, so all files need to be re-rendered.

  This flag is set to False if without-processing is True.

• no-report

  Normally, report plugins report on the final state of the output files. No-report prevents report plugins from being loaded or run.

  If without-processing is set, then the Report stage is skipped. If, however, the caches do not exist (deleted or first run), then the value of without-processing is ignored and the value of no-report is observed.

• no-cache

  RakuConfig will cache the previous configuration data by default. When testing a module, this is not desirable, so no-cache = True prevents caching.

• debug-when & verbose-when

  ProcessedPod uses debug and verbose, which provide information about which blocks are processed (debug), and the result after the application of the template. This is a lot of information and generally, it is only one file that is of interest.

  These two flags take a string, eg., :debug-when<Introduction.pod6> , and when the filename matches the string, then the debug/verbose flag is set for that file only. (verbose is only effective when debug is True).

• collection-info

  Causes collect to produce information about milestones and valid and invalid plugins

• with-only filename

  Collect is run only with that filename, which must be in the sources, and is specified like debug-when.

• no-code-escape

  ProcessedPod has a special flag for turning off escaping in code sections when a highlighter is used to pre-process code. In some cases, the highlighter also does HTML escaping, so RPR has to avoid it.

  This has to be done at the Mode level and not left to render plugins.

Plugin management

Plugins are Raku programs that are executed at specific milestones in the rendering process. The milestone are given in Milestones above.

The plugins-required key in the Mode's configuration contains a hash with keys whose names are the milestone names. Each key points to a list of plugin names, which are called in the order given.

All plugins must reside within the mode directory given by plugins, but this directory may belong to another Collection so that plugins can and should be shared between collections & modes.

All plugin names must be the name of a sub-directory of the plugins path. Within each plugin sub-directory, there must be a config.raku file containing information for the plugin, and for Collection.

With the exception of 'render' plugins, the config file contains a key for the type, which points to the program to be called.

Plugin's may need other configurable data, which should be kept in the config file for the plugin.

All plugins are expected to adhere to no-status and collection-info, which are interpretted as

• no-status if true means 'no output at all', equivalent to a quite flag

• collection-info if true means 'output extra information' (if need be), eqivalent to a verbose flag.

The plugin types are as follows.

Setup

Config hash must contain setup which is the name of a Raku program (a callable) that evaluates to a sub that takes a list of five items, eg.,

sub ( $source-cache, $mode-cache, Bool $full-render, $source-root, $mode-root, %options ) { ... }

$source-cache

A Pod::From::Cache+PostCache object containing the pod of the sources files

$mode-cache

Like the above for the mode content files

$full-render

If True, then the sub should process the cache objects with the .sources method on the cache objects, otherwise with the .list-files method on the cache objects (the .list-files method only provides the files that have changed).

$source-root

This path must be prepended to any sources added (see below) to the cache, otherwise they will not be added to the destination file.

$mode-root

Likewise for the mode sources.

%options

Has the values of 'collection-info' and 'no-status' flags.

New files can be added to the cache object inside the sub using the .add method, see Sources.

Render

The Collection plugin-manager calls the ProcessedPod.add-plugin method with the config keys and the path modified to the plugin's subdirectory.

If the render key is True, no callable is provided, and the plugin name will be added via the .add-plugin method of the ProcessedPod object. See ProcessedPod documentation.

If the render key is a Str, then it is the filename of a Raku callable of the form

sub ( $pr, %options --> Array ) {...}

where

• $pr is a <ProcessedPod> object,

• %options is the same as for Setup, and

• the callable returns a list of triples, with the form (to, from-plug, file)

• to is the destination under the %config<destination> directory where the asset will be looked for, eg., an image file to be served.

• plugin is the name of the plugin in whose directory the asset is contained, where the value myself means the path of the plugin calling the render callable. Actually, 'myself' is the value of Collection::MYSELF.

• file is the filename local to the source plugin's subdirectory that is to be copied to the destination. This may contain a path relative to the plugin's subdirectory.

Since a render plugin is to be added using the ProcessedPod interface, it must have the custom-raku and template-raku keys defined, even if they evaluate to blank (eg. :custom-raku() ).

So the config file must have:

• render (True | name of callable)

• custom-raku => a Raku program that evaluates to an array of custom blocks (must be set to () if no Raku program )

• template-raku => a Raku program that evaluates to a hash of RakuClosure templates (must be set to () if no Raku program)

It is possible to specify path but it must be relative to the plugin's sub-directory.

More information about these plugins can be found in the documentation in the Raku::Pod::Render distribution.

Compilation

The compilation key must point to a Raku program that delivers a sub object

sub ( $pr, %processed, %options) { ... }

$pr

is the ProcessedPod object rendering the content files.

%processed

is a hash whose keys are source file names with a hash values containing TOC, Glossary, Links, Metadata, Footnotes, Templates-used structures produced by ProcessedPod.

%options

as for setup

Report

The report key points to a Raku file that evaluates to a

sub (%processed, @plugins-used, $pr, %options --> Pair ) {...}

%processed

as in Compilation

@plugins-used

is an array of Pairs whose key is the milestone and value is a hash of the plugins used and their config parameters.

$pr

as in Compilation

%options

as for Setup

The plugin should return a Pair, where .key = (path/)name of the report file with extension, and .value is the text of the report in the appropriate format

The aim is one report plugin -> one report output in a specified format.

The collect sub will write the file to the correct directory.

Completion

The completion key points to a Raku file that evaluates to a sub ($destination, $landing-place, $output-ext, %completion-options, %options) {...} object.

• $destination

  is the name of the output path from the mode directory (defined in the mode configuration)

• $landing-place

  is the first file to be processed since, eg., for a website, order is not sufficient. name is relative to the destination directory.

• %completion-options (actually specified as %config<completion-options>)

  is the set of options that the completion plugin will require from the Mode-level configuration. For example, the very simple cro-run plugin requires the path to the static html files, the hostname, and the port on which the files are served. More complex plugins will require more options.

• %options

  As for Setup

There is no return value specified for this plugin type.

Post-cache methods

Post-cache is a role added to a Pod::From::Load object so that Setup plugins can act on Cache'd content but also add files to the Cache that will be rendered.

If the original file in the Cache is to be hidden, then a file with the same name is added to the Post-cache database. If the underlying cache object should remain visible, then another name should be given to a file in the Post-cache database.

The Post-cache methods sources, list-files, and pod have the same function and semantics as Pod::From::Cache with the caveat of hiding as described above. If there is no name in the Post-cache database, then it is passed on to the underlying cache.

multi method add(Str $fn, Array $p)

Adds the filename $fn to the cache. $p is expected to be an array of Pod::Blocks, but no check is made. This is intentional to allow the developer flexibility, but then a call to pod( $fn ) will yield an array that is not POD6, which might not be expected.

multi method add(Str $fn)

This will add only a filename to the database, and thus mask any existing filename in the underlying cache.

multi method add(Str $fn, Str :alias! )

This will add a filename to the database, with the value of a key in the underlying cache, and thus mask any the original spelling of the filename in the underlying cache.

method anti-alias(Str $fn --> Str )

Returns the original name of the cached content file, if an alias has been created, otherwise returns the same fn.

If the alias is already taken, an exception is thrown. This will even occur if the same alias is used for the same cached content file.

method pod(Str $fn)

Will return

• an array of Pod::Block (or other content - beware of adding other content) if the underlying Cache or database have content,

• the array of Pod::Block in an underlying filename, spelt differently

• Nil if there is no content (masking an underlying file in Cache)

• throw a NoPodInCache Exception if there is no pod associated with either the database or the underlying cache. If the original filename is used after an alias have been generated, the Exception will also be thrown.

Asset-cache methods

Asset-cache handles content that is not in Pod6 form. The instance of the Asset-cache class is passed via the plugin-data interface of ProcessedPod, so it is available to all render and compilation plugins, for example in the plugin callable:

sub render-plugin( $pp ) {
        my $image-manager = $pp.get-data('image-manager');
        ...
        $pp.add-data('custom-block', $image-manager);
    }

By creating a name-space in the plugin data section and assigning it the value of the image-manager, the plugin callable can make the image-manager available to templates that get that data, which is a property in parameters called by the name-space.

ProcessedPod provides data from the name-space of a Block, if it exists, as a parameter to the template called for the Block. Note that the default name-space for a block is all lower-case, unless a name-space config option is provided with the Pod Block in the content file.

$image-manager is of type Asset-cache, which has the following methods:

    #| the directory base, not included in filenames
    has Str $.basename is rw;
    #| the name of the file being rendered
    Str $.current-file
    #| asset-sources provides a list of all the items in the cache
    method asset-sources
    #| asset-used-list provides a list of all the items that referenced by Content files
    method asset-used-list
    #| asset-add adds an item to the data-base, for example, a transformed image
    method asset-add( $name, $object, :$by = (), :$type = 'image' )
    #| returns name / type / by information in database (not the object blob)
    method asset-db
    #| remove the named asset, and return its metadata
    method asset-delete( $name --> Hash )
    #| returns the type of the asset
    method asset-type( $name --> Str )
    #| if an asset with name and type exists in the database, then it is marked as used by the current file
    #| returns true with success, and false if not.
    method asset-is-used( $asset, $type --> Bool )
    #| brings all assets in directory with given extensions and with type
    #| these are set in the configuration
    multi method asset-slurp( $directory,  @extensions, $type )
    #| this just takes the value of the config key in the top-level configuration
    multi method asset-slurp( %asset-paths )
    #| with type 'all', all the assets are sent to the same output directory
    multi method asset-spurt( $directory, $type = 'all' )
    #| the value of the config key in the mode configuration
    multi method asset-spurt( %asset-paths )

Copyright and License

(c) Copyright, 2021-2022 Richard Hainsworth

LICENSE Artistic-2.0