vscode-documax

vscode-documax is an extension for Visual Studio Code that allows you to transform YAML files as structured data into Max reference files. It offers a few bells and whistles to make this process simple, such as:

• XML output preview
• Rendered preview (in progres...)
• Input and ouput configurations for complex projects
• Flexible mustache template rendering for bespoke purposes.

How do I use it?

Install the extension! That's it for the first part.

Configuration

Create a configuration, or don't. Here is how the extension works if you DON'T make a configuration. It reads all YAML files in a folder named sources and will render and output them (presuming no errors in the YAML) to a folder nameddocs`.

Read more about the configuration below in the next section.

Commands

Documax exposes three commands:

Documax: Preview Output

While a valid YAML file is open in the editor, triggering Documax: Preview Output will show a preview (or any errors from parsing the input) in a webview pane.

Documax: Generate Output

The extension will first read your configuration, and then process each configuration as follows. This is a "batch" process.

Documax: Toggle File Watching

This configures a status toggle by which if any changes are detected to the workspace, it will retrigger the batch process of generating outputs. Useful for seeing the output as you edit and for working iteratively.

Configuration Schema

A configuration is a .json file stored in the root of a workspace folder with the name documax.config.json.

This file defines a series of configurations that the extension will use to process an input folder and delivers the results to an output folder.

If this is too abstract, a basic configuration will look like this:

{
	"max" : {
		"input" : "my_yaml_files_folder",
		"output" : "output_folder"
	}
}

Everytime you generate an output, either via the automatic file watching, or a manual generation all of the .yaml files inside my_yaml_files_folder will be processed and the outputs will be rendered to output_folder. What is potentially useful about configurations is you can combine as many as you need and the extension will "multiplex" them. So this is a total valid configuration too:

{
	"package1" : {
		"input" : "project_yaml_1",
		"output" : "output_folder_1"
	},
	"package2" : {
		"input" : "project_yaml_2",
		"output": "output_folder_2"
	}
}