Programmatic API

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Background

To build more tools for the ecosystem we should be able to reuse features implemented in fabric. This means fabric must provide a programmatic API to be used in other Go-powered tools.

The goal of the programmatic API for fabric is to provide parsing, data fetching and content rendering capabilities to other tools.

Design

The API must provide the functions:

• a function that accepts a Fabric config, provided as a string, and returns all parsed root-level blocks as structs.
• a function that accepts all parsed root-level blocks as structs, name of the document block, and either a path to the content block in the document or a parsed content block struct to be rendered. The function returns a struct with the content block details and the rendered text
• a function that accepts all parsed root-level blocks as structs, name of the document block, and either a path to the data block in the document or a parsed data block struct to run. The function returns a struct with the data block details and the data returned by the plugin
• a function that accepts all parsed root-level blocks as structs, and either the name of the root-level data block or a parsed data block struct to run. The function returns a struct with the data block details and the data returned by the plugin.

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there are some open questions there:

• how are plugins initialized? maybe a separate Init() function that accepts the config blocks is necessary before any of the rendering
• how do we define a path to a content block inside a document tree? With anonymous nested section blocks, the path might not be straight forward to produce.

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This issue might be too abstract to argue about, so it is better to postpone it until we have a clear use case

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it's time!