toolchains.rst

Toolchains

The commands available for toolchains are:

How to check that a toolchain is correctly declared?

To check that a toolchain declaration file is correctly written, the command line tool can be used.

For example, we check a correct file (found in src/beat.core/beat/core/test/toolchains/integers_addition.json):

$ ./bin/beat --prefix=src/beat.core/beat/core/test/ toolchains check \
  integers_addition
The toolchain is executable!

Here, the --prefix option is used to tell the scripts where all our data formats, toolchains and algorithms are located, and integers_addition is the name of the toolchain we want to check (note that we don't add the .json extension, as this is the name of the toolchain, not the filename!).

Now we check a file that isn't a correctly formatted JSON file:

src/beat.core/beat/core/test/toolchains/invalid/invalid.json:

{
    "invalid": true,
}

$ ./bin/beat --prefix=src/beat.core/beat/core/test/ toolchains check \
  invalid/invalid
The toolchain isn't valid, due to the following errors:
    Failed to decode the JSON file 'beat/src/beat.core/beat/core/test/toolchains/invalid/invalid.json':
        Expecting property name enclosed in double quotes: line 3 column 1 (char 23)

Here we are told that something is wrong JSON-wise around the line 3, column 1 of the JSON file. The error is the , (comma) character: in JSON, the last field of an object ({}) or the last element of an array ([]) cannot be followed by a comma. This is the corrected version:

{
    "invalid": true
}

Also note that since we tell the script that all our toolchain declaration files are located in src/beat.core/beat/core/test/toolchains/, the subfolders in that location are considered as part of the name of the data formats they contains (like here invalid/invalid).

As a last example, here is the result of the script when the toolchain references unknown inputs and outputs (see the following sections for explanations about the content of the declaration file):

src/beat.core/beat/core/test/toolchains/invalid/empty_blocks_list.json:

{
    "blocks": [],
    "databases": [ {
            "name": "integers",
            "outputs": {
                "values": "single_integer"
            }
        }
    ],
    "connections": [ {
            "from": "integers.values",
            "to": "echo.in"
        }
    ],
    "results": [
        "echo.out"
    ]
}

$ ./bin/beat --prefix=src/beat.core/beat/core/test/ toolchains check \
  invalid/empty_blocks_list
The toolchain isn't valid, due to the following errors:
    Unknown inputs: echo.in
    Unknown result outputs: echo.out