jbarcas / angular-gdl-editor

Guideline Definition Language Editor

Angular GDL Editor

The GDL Editor is an AngularJS web application that allows users to create, edit and run GDL files. GDL is a formal language designed to represent clinical knowledge for decision support. It is designed to be natural language- and reference terminology- agnostic by leveraging the designs of openEHR Reference Model and Archetype Model. This tool provides an editing and testing environment capable of generating forms based on the elements defined in the GDL.

Getting Started

To get started simply clone the angular-gdl-editor repository and install the dependencies:

Prerequisites

You need git to clone the angular-gdl-editor repository. You can get git from http://git-scm.com/.

We also use a number of node.js tools to initialize and test angular-gdl-editor. You must have node.js and its package manager (npm) installed. You can get them from http://nodejs.org/.

Clone angular-gdl-editor

Clone the angular-gdl-editor repository using git:

git clone https://github.com/jbarcas/angular-gdl-editor.git
cd angular-gdl-editor

If you just want to start a new project without the angular-gdl-editor commit history then you can do:

git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/jbarcas/angular-gdl-editor.git <your-project-name>

The depth=1 tells git to only pull down one commit worth of historical data.

Install Dependencies

We have two kinds of dependencies in this project: tools and angular framework code. The tools help us manage and test the application.

• We get the tools we depend upon via npm, the node package manager.
• We get the angular code via bower, a client-side code package manager.

We have preconfigured npm to automatically run bower so we can simply do:

npm install

Behind the scenes this will also call bower install. You should find that you have two new folders in your project.

• node_modules - contains the npm packages for the tools we need
• app/bower_components - contains the angular framework files

Note that the bower_components folder would normally be installed in the root folder but angular-gdl-editor changes this location through the .bowerrc file. Putting it in the app folder makes it easier to serve the files by a webserver.

Run the Application

Before running the application you should start the Knowledge Manager Server (KM Server). Contact the author for more info.

We have preconfigured the project with a simple development web server. The simplest way to start this server is:

npm start

Now browse to the app at http://localhost:8000/index.html.

Testing

There are two kinds of tests in the angular-gdl-editor application: Unit tests and end-to-end tests.

Running Unit Tests

The angular-gdl-editor app has unit tests written in Jasmine, which we run with the Karma Test Runner. We provide a Karma configuration file to run them.

• the configuration is found at karma.conf.js
• the unit tests are found next to the code they are testing and are named as <file.name>.spec.js.

The easiest way to run the unit tests is to use the supplied npm script:

npm test

This script will start the Karma test runner to execute the unit tests. Moreover, Karma will sit and watch the source and test files for changes and then re-run the tests whenever any of them change. This is the recommended strategy; if your unit tests are being run every time you save a file then you receive instant feedback on any changes that break the expected code functionality.

You can also ask Karma to do a single run of the tests and then exit. This is useful if you want to check that a particular version of the code is operating as expected. The project contains a predefined script to do this:

npm run test-single-run

End to end testing

The angular-gdl-editor app comes with end-to-end tests, again written in Jasmine. These tests are run with the Protractor End-to-End test runner. It uses native events and has special features for Angular applications.

• the configuration is found at e2e-tests/protractor-conf.js
• the end-to-end tests are found in e2e-tests/scenarios.js

Protractor simulates interaction with our web app and verifies that the application responds correctly. Therefore, our web server needs to be serving up the application, so that Protractor can interact with it.

npm start

In addition, since Protractor is built upon WebDriver we need to install this. The angular-gdl-editor project comes with a predefined script to do this:

npm run update-webdriver

This will download and install the latest version of the stand-alone WebDriver tool.

Once you have ensured that the development web server hosting our application is up and running and WebDriver is updated, you can run the end-to-end tests using the supplied npm script:

npm run protractor

This script will execute the end-to-end tests against the application being hosted on the development server.

Updating Angular

As the angular framework library code and tools are acquired through package managers (npm and bower) you can use these tools instead to update the dependencies.

You can update the tool dependencies by running:

npm update

This will find the latest versions that match the version ranges specified in the package.json file.

You can update the Angular dependencies by running:

bower update

This will find the latest versions that match the version ranges specified in the bower.json file.

Continuous Integration

Travis CI

Travis CI is a continuous integration service, which can monitor GitHub for new commits to your repository and execute scripts such as building the app or running tests. The angular-gdl-editor project contains a Travis configuration file, .travis.yml, which will cause Travis to run your tests when you push to GitHub.

You will need to enable the integration between Travis and GitHub. See the Travis website for more instruction on how to do this.

Contact

For more information on Angular GDL Editor please send an e-mail to the author