A Story's "Outline" is that most important element of a story. The outline is a json document that contains a series of rendering instructions for a presalytics.io Story.
Outlines are rendered from the data in this json object by a "Renderer", which is special type of object in the Presalytics Python Library with methods that convert outlines to html.
A Story's outline should conform to the the Story Outline JSON Schema. The schema defines the properties detailed below:
title: The title of story. This property is synced the the title of the Story object.
description: Text notes for other editors. Typically used to describe made in the current revision of the outline.
info: Metadata about this story outline. Includes data on revision number, date created, date modified, creator name and revision notes
pages: A list of the Story Outline Pages. See the pages section below for more information.
themes: A list of themes of the story outline. A theme typically defines default colors and text formats (e.g., fonts) for a story.
A page within a Story outline defines instructions of converting a set of widgets to html. The page object governs the layout of widgets on page in the story. A page object has the following properties:
name: The name of the page
kind: A unique string that maps to class that implements the PageTemplateBase Class in the Presalytics Python library. Classes that implement this class have __component_kind__ property that maps the the kind of this page, and a render() method that implements this class.
widgets: A list of widgets that this page renders. See Below for more information
plugins: A list of plugins used when rendering this page. See Below.
The widget object is the lowest-level building block for Presalytics Stories. A widget is a flexible object that can map a data source (e.g., a SQL query) to an html fragment.
name: The name of the widget
kind: A unique string that maps to class that implements the WidgetBase Class in the Presalytics Python library. Classes that implement this class have __component_kind__ property that maps the the kind of this page, and a render() method that implements this class.
data: A set of requeirement parameters needed to convert this widget into html. The strcuture of the data object will be different for each widget kind.
plugins: A list of plugins used when rendering this page. See Below.
plugin objects are resuable scripts and styles that are used help pages and widgets render. For example, if a widget requires a certain javascript library in order to render properly, a script plugin can be used to place a script tag in the html. Libraries such as React.js, D3.js, etc. can all be loaded natively in a Story, and rendered accordingly. A style plugin can be used load either custom inline styles or and external link (e.g., bootstrap).
Properties of the plugin object are as follows:
name: a name for this plugin
kind: The plugin type. Either "style" for style pligns or "script" for script plugins
data: Any data required for the plugin to load correctly. Could include key-value pairs to include in a script or style plugin that gets loaded via a template.