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DocFX Document Schema v1.0 Specification

1. Introduction

DocFX supports different document processors to handle different kinds of input. For now, if the data model changes a bit, a new document processor is needed, even most of the work in processors are the same.

DocFX Document Schema (abbreviated to THIS schema below) is introduced to address this problem. This schema is a JSON media type for defining the structure of a DocFX document. This schema is intended to annotate, validate and interpret the document data.

2. Conventions and Terminology

The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119.

3. Overview

DocFX Document Schema is in JSON format. It borrows most syntax from JSON Schema, while it also introduces some other syntax to manipulate the data.

3.1 Annotation

THIS schema is a JSON based format for the structure of a DocFX document.

3.2 Validation

JSON schema validation already defines many keywords. This schema starts from supporting limited keyword like type, properties.

3.3 Interpretation

Besides annotate and validate the input document model, THIS schema also defines multiple interpretations for each property of the document model. For example, a property named summary contains value in Markdown format, THIS schema can define a markup interpretation for the summary property, so that the property can be marked using DFM syntax.

4. General Considerations

  • THIS schema leverages JSON schema definition, that is to say, keywords defined in JSON schema keeps its meaning in THIS schema when it is supported by THIS schema.

5. Detailed Specification

Format

The files describing DocFX document model in accordance with the DocFX document schema specification are represented as JSON objects and conform to the JSON standards. YAML, being a superset of JSON, can be used as well to represent a DocFX document schema specification file.

All field names in the specification are case sensitive.

This schema exposes two types of fields. Fixed fields, which have a declared name, and Patterned fields, which declare a regex pattern for the field name. Patterned fields can have multiple occurrences as long as each has a unique name.

By convention, the schema file is suffixed with .schema.json.

Data Types

Primitive data types in THIS schema are based on JSON schema Draft 6 4.2 Instance

Schema

For a given field, * as the starting character in Description cell stands for required.

Schema Object

This is the root document object for THIS schema.

Fixed Field
Field Name Type Description
$schema string *The version of the schema specification, for example, https://github.com/dotnet/docfx/v1.0/schema#.
version string *The version of current schema object.
id string It is best practice to include an id property as an unique identifier for each schema.
title string The title of current schema, LandingPage, for example. In DocFX, this value can be used to determine what kind of documents apply to this schema, If not specified, file name before schema.json of this schema is used. Note that . is not allowed.
description string A short description of current schema.
type string *The type of the root document model MUST be object.
properties Property Definitions Object An object to hold the schema of all the properties.
metadata string In json-pointer format as defined in http://json-schema.org/latest/json-schema-validation.html#rfc.section.8.3.9. The format for JSON pointer is defined by https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6901, referencing to the metadata object. Metadata object is the object to define the metadata for current document, and can be also set through globalMetadata or fileMetadata in DocFX. The default value for metadata is empty which stands for the root object.
Patterned Field
Field Name Type Description
^x- Any Allows extensions to THIS schema. The field name MUST begin with x-, for example, x-internal-id. The value can be null, a primitive, an array or an object.

Property Definitions Object

It is an object where each key is the name of a property and each value is a schema to describe that property.

Patterned Field
Field Name Type Description
{name} Property Object The schema object for the {name} property

Property Object

An object to describe the schema of the value of the property.

Fixed Field
Field Name Type Description
title string The title of the property.
description string A lengthy explanation about the purpose of the data described by the schema.
default what type defined The default value for current field.
type string The type of the root document model. Refer to type keyword for detailed description.
properties Property Definitions Object An object to hold the schema of all the properties if type for the model is object. Omitting this keyword has the same behavior as an empty object.
items Property Object An object to hold the schema of the items if type for the model is array. Omitting this keyword has the same behavior as an empty schema.
reference string Defines whether current property is a reference to the actual value of the property. Refer to reference for detailed explanation.
contentType string Defines the content type of the property. Refer to contentType for detailed explanation.
tags array Defines the tags of the property. Refer to tags for detailed explanation.
mergeType string Defines how to merge the property. Omitting this keyword has the same behavior as merge. Refer to mergeType for detailed explanation.
xrefProperties array Defines the properties of current object when it is cross referenced by others. Each item is the name of the property in the instance. Refer to xrefProperties for detailed description of how to leverage this property.
Patterned Field
Field Name Type Description
^x- Any Allows extensions to THIS schema. The field name MUST begin with x-, for example, x-internal-id. The value can be null, a primitive, an array or an object.

6. Keywords in detail

6.1 type

Same as in JSON schema: http://json-schema.org/latest/json-schema-validation.html#rfc.section.6.25

The value of this keyword MUST be either a string or an array. If it is an array, elements of the array MUST be strings and MUST be unique.

String values MUST be one of the six primitive types ("null", "boolean", "object", "array", "number", or "string"), or "integer" which matches any number with a zero fractional part.

An instance validates if and only if the instance is in any of the sets listed for this keyword.

6.2 reference

It defines whether current property is a reference to the actual value of the property. The values MUST be one of the following:

Value Description
none It means the property is not a reference.
file It means current property stands for a file path that contains content to be included.

6.3 contentType

It defines how applications interpret the property. If not defined, the behavior is similar to default value. The values MUST be one of the following:

Value Description
default It means that no interpretion will be done to the property.
uid type MUST be string. With this value, the property name MUST be uid. It means the property defines a unique identifier inside current document model.
href type MUST be string. It means the property defines a file link inside current document model. Application CAN help to validate if the linked file exists, and update the file link if the linked file changes its output path.
xref type MUST be string. It means the property defines a UID link inside current document model. Application CAN help to validate if the linked UID exists, and resolve the UID link to the corresponding file output link.
file type MUST be string. It means the property defines a file path inside current document model. Application CAN help to validate if the linked file exists, and resolve the path to the corresponding file output path. The difference between file and href is that href is always URL encoded while file is not.
markdown type MUST be string. It means the property is in DocFX flavored Markdown syntax. Application CAN help to transform it into HTML format.

6.4 tags

The value of this keyword MUST be an array, elements of the array MUST be strings and MUST be unique. It provides hints for applications to decide how to interpret the property, for example, localizable tag can help Localization team to interpret the property as localizable.

6.5 mergeType

The value of this keyword MUST be a string. It specifies how to merge two values of the given property. One use scenario is how DocFX uses the overwrite files to overwrite the existing values. In the below table, we use source and target to stands for the two values for merging.

The value MUST be one of the following:

Value Description
key If key for source equals to the one for target, these two values are ready to merge.
merge The default behavior. For array, items in the list are merged by key for the item. For string or any value type, target replaces source. For object, merge each property along with its own merge value.
replace target replaces source.
ignore source is not allowed to be merged.

6.6 xrefProperties

The value of this keyword MUST be an array of string. Each string value is the property name of current object that will be exported to be Cross Referenced by others. To leverage this feature, a new xref syntax with template attribute is support:

<xref uid="{uid}" template="{path_of_partial_template}" />

For the parital template, the input model is the object containing properties xrefProperties defines.

For example, in the sample schema defined by 7. Samples, "xrefProperties": [ "title", "description" ],, title and description are xrefProperties for uid webapp. A partial template to render this xref, for example, named partials/overview.tmpl, looks like:

{{title}}: {{{description}}}

When someone references this uid using <xref uid="webapp" template="partials/overview.tmpl", docfx expand this xref into the following html:

Web Apps Documentation: <p>This is description</p>

In this way, users can not only cross reference others to get the target url, but also cross reference other properties as they like.

A common usage of this is the Namespace page in ManagedReference. The Namespace page shows a table of its Classes with the summary of the Class, with the help of xrefProperties, the source of truth summary is always from Class. For the Namespace page, it can, for example:

  1. Define a class.tr.tmpl template: <tr><td>{{name}}</td><td>{{{summary}}}</td></tr>
  2. The namespace namespace.tmpl template, use xref to render its children classes: 
    {{#children}}
  <xref uid="{{uid}}" template="class.tr.tmpl" />
{{/children}}

7. Samples

Here's an sample of the schema. Assume we have the following YAML file:

### YamlMime:LandingPage
title: Web Apps Documentation
description: This is description
uid: webapp
metadata:
  title: Azure Web Apps Documentation - Tutorials, API Reference
  meta.description: Learn how to use App Service Web Apps to build and host websites and web applications.
  services: app-service
  author: apexprodleads
  manager: carolz
  ms.service: app-service
  ms.tgt_pltfrm: na
  ms.devlang: na
  ms.topic: landing-page
  ms.date: 01/23/2017
  ms.author: carolz
sections:
- title: 5-Minute Quickstarts
  children:
  - text: .NET
    href: app-service-web-get-started-dotnet.md
  - text: Node.js
    href: app-service-web-get-started-nodejs.md
  - text: PHP
    href: app-service-web-get-started-php.md
  - text: Java
    href: app-service-web-get-started-java.md
  - text: Python
    href: app-service-web-get-started-python.md
  - text: HTML
    href: app-service-web-get-started-html.md
- title: Step-by-Step Tutorials
  children:
  - content: "Create an application using [.NET with Azure SQL DB](app-service-web-tutorial-dotnet-sqldatabase.md) or [Node.js with MongoDB](app-service-web-tutorial-nodejs-mongodb-app.md)"
  - content: "[Map an existing custom domain to your application](app-service-web-tutorial-custom-domain.md)"
  - content: "[Bind an existing SSL certificate to your application](app-service-web-tutorial-custom-SSL.md)"

In this sample, we want to use the JSON schema to describe the overall model structure. Further more, the href is a file link. It need to be resolved from the relative path to the final href. The content property need to be marked up as a Markdown string. The metadata need to be tagged for further custom operations. We want to use section's title as the key for overwrite section array.

Here's the schema to describe these operations:

{
    "$schema": "https://dotnet.github.io/docfx/schemas/v1.0/schema.json#",
    "version": "1.0.0",
    "id": "https://github.com/dotnet/docfx/schemas/landingpage.schema.json",
    "title": "LandingPage",
    "description": "The schema for landing page",
    "type": "object",
    "xrefProperties": [ "title", "description" ],
    "properties": {
        "metadata": {
            "type": "object",
            "tags": [ "metadata" ]
        },
        "uid": {
            "type": "string",
            "contentType": "uid"
        },
        "sections": {
            "type": "array",
            "items": {
                "type": "object",
                "properties": {
                    "children": {
                        "type": "array",
                        "items": {
                            "type": "object",
                            "properties": {
                                "href": {
                                    "type": "string",
                                    "contentType": "href"
                                },
                                "text": {
                                    "type": "string",
                                    "tags": [ "localizable" ]
                                },
                                "content": {
                                    "type": "string",
                                    "contentType": "markdown"
                                }
                            }
                        }
                    },
                    "title": {
                        "type": "string",
                        "mergeType": "key"
                    }
                }
            }
        },
        "title": {
            "type": "string"
        }
    }
}

8. Q & A

  1. DocFX fills _global metadata into the processed data model, should the schema reflect this behavior?
    • Decision: NOT include, this schema is for input model, use another schema for output model.
  2. Is it necessary to prefix d- to every field that DocFX introduces in?
    • If keep d-
      • Pros:
        1. d- makes it straightforward that these keywords are introduced by DocFX
        2. Keywords DocFX introduces in will never duplicate with the one preserved by JSON schema
      • Cons:
        1. d- prefix provides a hint that these keywords are not first class keywords
        2. Little chance that keywords DocFX defines duplicate with what JSON schema defines, after all, JSON schema defines a finite set of reserved keywords.
        3. For exampleSwagger spec is also based on JSON schema and the fields it introduces in has no prefix.
    • Decision: Remove d- prefix.