The configuration file: 'docnet.json'

DocNet uses a json file to determine what to do in what form. The format is straight forward and described below

{
    "Name" : "name of site",
    "Source" : "sourcefolder",
    "Destination" : "destinationfolder",
    "IncludeSource": "includefolder",
    "Theme" : "themename",
    "ThemeFolder" : "themefolder",
    "SourceFoldersToCopy" : ["folder1", "foldern"],
    "Footer" : "footer text or HTML",
    "StartingPageName" : "Home",
    "ConvertLocalLinks" : "true" | "false",
    "PathSpecification" : "Full" | "Relative" | "RelativeAsFolder",
    "UrlFormatting" : "None" | "Strip" | "Dashes",
    "MaxLevelInToC" : "3",
    "StripIndexHtm" : "true" | "false",
    "Pages" : 
    {
        "__index" : "index.md",
        "Title Page 1" : "filename_page1.md", 
        "Title Page 2" : "filename_page2.md",
        "Sub Header 1" : 
        {
            "__index" : "index.md",
            "Title Page 3" : "filename_page3.md",
            "Title Page 4" : "filename_page4.md"
        },
        "Auto generated" : "reference/**"
    }
}

The order in which the pages are specified is the order in which they'll appear in the navigation.

Name

Specifies the name of the site to generate.

Source

Specifies the root of the tree of folders in which markdown files are expected. sourcefolder can be a relative path or an absolute path and is used as the root folder for filenames specified in Pages.

Destination

Specifies the folder where the output will be written to (.htm files). The output will be written to this folder only, all files from subfolders in Source will be written to the folder specified in Destination. with the same structure as the navigation in Pages. destinationfolder can be a relative path or an absolute path.

IncludeSource

Specifies the folder where the files specified to be included using @@include directives are located. If IncludeSource isn't specified, the value Includes is assumed.

Theme

Specifies the name of the theme to use which is a folder within the Themes folder in the folder the docnet executable is located which is used as the theme for the pages to generate. Docnet expects a file called PageTemplate.htm within the specified Theme folder, which contains the HTML which is used as the wrapper file for the HTML generated from the markdown. It has to contain a couple of marker, which are described later in this document. If Theme isn't specified, Default is assumed.

If ThemeFolder is specified, the theme is looked up in that folder.

ThemeFolder

Optional folder specification of the folder which contains the theme specified in Theme. If not specified, the Themes folder of the docnet executable is used.

SourceFoldersToCopy

This is an optional directive with, if specified, one or more folder names relative to Source, which contain files to copy to the Destination folder. E.g. image files used in the markdown files, located in an Images folder can be copied this way to the output folder reliably. All folders specified are copied recursively.

ConvertLocalLinks

This is an optional directive which, if specified and set to "true", will make DocNet convert all local links to .md suffixed files into .htm files. Example: (local link)[somemarkdownfile.md] will be converted to <a href="somemarkdownfile.htm">local link</a>. Non-local urls are not converted. Default: "false".

PathSpecification

Determines the way (md) paths are treated by the tooling. The default value is Full for backwards compatibility.

• Full: Assumes that all paths are full paths. All auto-generated index files will be placed in the root folder (this setting can lead to index clashes when reusing names in subfolders).
• Relative: Assumes that all paths are relative paths. All auto-generated index files will be put in the right (sub)folder.
• RelativeAsFolder: Behaves the same as Relative, but puts every source md in its own folder resulting in clean navigation urls (e.g. /getting-started/introduction.htm becomes /getting-started/introduction/index.htm)

UrlFormatting

Determines how the urls are formatted. The default value is None which will only remove unsupported characters from the urls.

• None: Does not touch the urls except from removing unsupported characters from the urls.
• Strip: Replaces all non-text characters (e.g. spaces, dots, commas, etc) by an empty string (e.g. /my-documentation/Some Introduction.md results in /mydocumentation/someintroduction.htm)
• Dashes: Replaces all non-text characters (e.g. spaces, dots, commas, etc) by a dash (-) (e.g. /my-documentation/Some Introduction.md results in /my-documentation/some-introduction.htm)

MaxLevelInToC

Sets the level of headings to show in the Table of Contents (ToC). The default value is 2. To show one additional level, one would use 3 for this value.

StripIndexHtm

If set to true, the tool will strip index.htm from the end of urls. The default value is false.

Footer

This is text and/or HTML which is placed in the footer of each page, using a marker (see below).

StartingPageName

This is the name used for the home/starting page, i.e. the __index page at the root level. The default value is "Home".

Pages

Contains the pages to generate into the output, in the order and structure in which you want them to appear in the navigation. The name given is the value used in the navigation tree and has to be unique per level. The value specified with each name is the markdown file to load, parse and generate as .htm file in the output. The markdown file is relative to the path specified in Source. A file foo.md will be generated as foo.htm in the output.

Paths are expected to use \ characters, and as it's json, you have to escape them, so the path .\foo becomes .\\foo.

Each level, starting with the root, has a special page defined, __index. This page is the page shown when the level header (in the example above this is e.g. Sub Header 1) is clicked in the navigation. If __index is specified in the root level, it's assigned to the navigation name Home. If there's no __index specified, there will still be a page generated but it will have default content (See below). The names of the elements are case sensitive.

Levels without __index defined

If a level has no __index defined, DocNet will create a __index entry for the level and will specify as target <path to index of parent>/nameoflevel.md. If the page exists it will be loaded as the content for the index of the level, if it doesn't exist, the HTML will simply contain the topictitle and a list of all the sub topics in the level. This guarantees the tree can always be navigated in full.

Use of wildcard inclusions

If a level has a string value ending with **, it will process all .md files in the folders and subfolders and generate htm files from them. It will use the following process:

1. Search (recursively) for all markdown (.md) files inside the specified folder (e.g. reference)
2. Generate index (htm) files for all folders
3. The title of the markdown files will be retrieved from the actual markdown files (so the first non-empty line will be used as title)