imag/doc/src/01010-architecture.md

Architecture of the imag code

The imag codebase has a rather simple overall architecture. In this chapter the types of crates, architecture of an imag module and the type structure are described.

Crate types

There are different types of crates in the imag world. A crate is a rust project.

First of all, there are core crates. These crates provide the very core of imag and almost all other crates use them:

• libimagstore - The imag store is the abstraction over the filesystem. It provides primitives to get, write and manipulate store entries and their header information.
• libimagrt - The runtime library, which provides functionality to create a store object from libimagstore, helps with configurarion loading and commandline argument handling (through the external "clap" crate).
• libimagerror - Error handling library for handling errors the imag way. Used in all other crates, even the store itself. It also offers functionality to log and trace errors as well as exiting the application, if necessary.
• libimagutil - Utilities.

The next type of imag crates are entry extension libraries. Those provide extensional functionality for the types from libimagstore. For example, there is "libimagentrylink" which provides functionality to link two entries in the store.

The third kind of crate is the one that offers end-user functionality for a imag domain, for example "libimagtodo" provides functionality to track todos.

And last, but not least, the commandline frontend crates provide the user interface. These are the kind of crates that are not library crates, but binaries.

Besides these, there are some other utility crates.

Architecture of an imag module

With the things from above, a module could have the following architecture:

+---------------------------------------------+
|  imag-foo                                   |
+-----------------------------------+---------+
|  libimagfoo                       |         |
+-----------------+-----------------+         |
|                 |                 |         |
| libimagentrybar | libimagentrybaz |         |
|                 |                 |   lib   |
+-----------------+-----------------+         |
|                                   |         |
|  ...                              |         |
|                                   |   imag  |
+-----------------------------------+         |
|                                   |         |
| libimagrt                         |         |
|                                   |  error  |
+-----------------------------------+         |
|                                   |         |
| libimagstore                      |         |
|                                   |         |
+-----------------------------------+---------+

The foundation of all imag modules is the store, as one can see in the visualization from above. Above the store library there is the libimagrt, which provides the basic runtime and access to the Store object. Cross-cutting, there is the error library (and possibly the util library, but we do not care about this one here), which is used through all levels. The highest level of all imag modules is the commandline interface on top of the domain library. In between can be any number of entry extension libraries, or none if not needed.

Theoretically, the commandline interface crate could be replaced to build a terminal user interface, graphical user interface or web interface.

Types

The imag core, hence the libimagstore, libimagrt and libimagerror, provide a set of types that a user (as in a library writer) should be aware of.

First of all, there is the Runtime type which is provided by the libimagrt. It provides basic access to whether debugging or verbosity is enabled as well as the most important core object: The Store.

The Store type is provided by the libimagstore library, the heart of everything.

When interacting with the store, two types are visible: FileLockEntry and Entry whereas the former derefs to the latter, which basically means that the former wraps the latter. The FileLockEntry is a necessary wrapper for ensuring that when working concurrently with the store, an entry is only borrowed once from the store. It also ensures that the object is alive as long as the store is.

The Entry type provides functionality like reading the actual content, its header and so on. Extensions for its functionality are implemented on this type, not on the FileLockEntry.

The Entry provides access to its header, which is a toml::Value, where toml is the toml-rs crate (external project). Convenience functionality is provided via the toml-query crate, which is an external project which was initiated and extracted from the imag project.

Error types are also important. All errors in imag projects should be created with error-chain. libimagerror provides functionality to enhance the experience with Result types and general tracing of errors.