COVID-UI Schemas

The schemas documenting communication shared between the model-runner, the web interface, and the model connectors.

Generating schema

Only the Typescript types in src/ (or example files in docs/*-annotated.json) should be updated manually. After making a change, run npm run build to update the JSON schema files and documentation automatically.

Adding / documenting schemas

The initial purpose of this repository was to define common input and output schemas which could be used by connectors for a variety of different models, allowing simulations to be defined using the web-ui and executed with multiple models. Over time, this has extended to also allow model developers to use the API of the web-ui to submit simulations for an individual model, using model-specific parameters. These parameters still need to be defined in this repository.

To add a new schema, at a minimum you must:

1. Create a new file called src/input-<name>.ts, containing a type <Name>ModelInput (and any necessary related types)

   • You can use the existing types src/input-minimal.ts and src/input-common.ts as examples
   • You should add documentation for the new type into the Typescript comments as much as possible, as these comments are automatically extracted into the documentation, and into the API documentation of the web-ui

2. Create a new file called src/output-<name>.ts, containing a type <Name>ModelOutput (and any necessary related types)

   • Your <Name>ModelOutput type should include a field metadata: <Name>ModelInput
   • Again, you can use the existing types src/output-minimal.ts and src/output-common.ts as examples

3. Edit the file src/input.ts to import your new type and add it to the ModelInput type union

4. Edit the file src/output.ts to import your new type and add it to the ModelInput type union

5. Edit the file script/generate-schema to add the following

   echo Generating <name> input schema
   ts-json-schema-generator --path src/input-<name>.ts --type <Name>ModelInput --out schema/input-<name>.json
   wetzel schema/input-<name>.json -w > docs/input-<name>.md
   
   echo Generating <name> output schema
   ts-json-schema-generator --path src/output-<name>.ts --type <Name>ModelOutput --out schema/output-<name>.json
   wetzel schema/output-<name>.json -w > docs/output-<name>.md

6. Run npm run build to generate the schema and documentation

7. Commit your changes (including the generated schema and documentation files), and raise a PR in order to have them merged in

For particularly complicated schemas, you may also wish to add an example of a valid input file. If you wish to do so:

1. Create a new file called docs/input-<name>-annotated.json containing your example

   • You can use the existing docs/input-common-annotated.json as an example

2. Edit the file script/generate-schema to add the following (after the line beginning wetzel schema/input-<name>.json ...)

   strip-json-comments --no-whitespace docs/input-<name>-annotated.json > docs/input-<name>-example.json
   ajv validate -s schema/input-<name>.json -d docs/input-<name>-example.json

3. Run npm run build to generate the schema and documentation, and validate your example

You can follow the same process to generate an example output file.

Publishing

GitHub Actions will build, test, and publish whenever changes are committed to this repository, including pushing tags to the NPM registry.

To build and publish a numbered version of a package, run npm version [major | minor | patch], then run git push --tags.