The Live Data Embedder (or just Embedder) is a simple macro processor (or template engine) for inserting dynamic data and actions in a web page. It is a core part of an authoring and publishing environment for a data entry and viewing web application.
As other authoring tools developed in this project, Embedder is an authoring tool based on wikitext such as Markdown. A simple marking syntax for live data and web actions are embedded in a source and converted to an Markdown source. A live data comes from a row-by-column style data table in an SQL database.
The overall authoring and publishing system is built around a web server (such as apache). The CGI mechanism is used to build a dynamic web page that provides live data. The WebDav feature is used to store application source data on apache-managed directories.
A brief introduction page:
See Embedder section of the overall PREPRO documentation:
See Embedder section of PREPRO syntax summary, see syntax.html (English).
For architecture and background behind preprocessors including Embedder, see arch.html (English).
You can run Embedder locally on your PC without Apache configuration. All you need is a Linux command line environment. On Windows, you can use Windows Subsystem for Windows (WSL), cygwin, etc.
See sample directory.
It contains sample files to run the embedder locally on the linux command line.
- run-locally.sh (bash script to start frontend.cgi which in turn starts Embedder.pm)
- customer.md (test markdown source)
- sample.db (sqlite3 database file including 'customer' table)
To use the local test script, install the following packages:
- Pandoc markdown-to-html converter
- SQLite v3 (sqlite3)
- Perl interpreter
- DBI
- DBD::SQLite
Embedder depends on some files in the sister project, Author. Clone the repository and run the following command:
$ export PREPRO_AUTHOR=/path/to/author/prepro
$ export PREPRO_DATA=/path/to/livedata/prepro
$ ./run-locally.sh
This emulates a view operation against /customer.md. Other tests include edit, add, update and delete operations. See the comments inside 'run-locally.sh' for detail.
Copyright (c) 2020 Kobu.Com. Some Rights Reserved. Distributed under GNU General Public License 3.0. Contact Kobu.Com for other types of licenses.
2020-may-09 project started
2020-jun-05 documents for the first working implementation
2020-aug-23 published to github
2020-oct-19 third edition