ARDI User Content Framework

The User Content Framework (or UCF) is a common pattern found in a number of ARDI addons, including our Reporting, Infographics and Function addons.

It's a very basic method of providing custom content in an ARDI addon.

In any UCF-based addon, you add new items (be they reports, displays or API functions), you'll have a base folder.

Normally, this will be found in your ARDI site folder, along side all of your media-files and settings.

The actual folder name will vary depending on the addon, but you'll find a couple of examples below…

As an example, if you installed ARDI onto a Windows system in C:\ARDI, you'll find the reports for the 'default' database at…

 C:\ARDI\web\sites\default\reports

Under that folder, you'll find any shared resource files (ie. Python libraries, images, settings etc.).

You'll also find a sub-folder for each piece of content you add to the system. For example, the Reporting addon will have a folder for every report, the Infographics addon will have a folder for every display.

Although they are technically supported, for compatibility reasons we suggest that the folder names don't contain any spaces and are lower-case. This helps avoid issues should an ARDI server ever migrate from Windows to Linux platforms.

Note: Sub-folders with a leading underscore (_) symbol are ignored.

Inside the folder for each item is an info.txt or info.json file that describes the specific piece of content.

At a minimum, this file will include the name of the content (ie. the human-readable name of the report or display) and the folder it should appear in when users browse through the user-interface.

In many cases, you can split your content into sub-folders using the '/' character.

You can also assign a single piece of content to multiple folders by using a vertical bar (|) to split different folder names.

For example…

 Daily Reports

The content appears in the 'Daily Reports' folder

 Daily Reports/Technical

The content appears in the 'Technical' folder, which is inside 'Daily Reports'

  Daily Reports|Control Reports

The content appears in both the 'Daily Reports' folder and the 'Control Reports' folder.

You'll also find the required content files in this folder. This varies depending on the addon - Infographics will usually require a Javascript file called generate.js, reports will have a Python script called report.py.

At first glance, this system seems very basic. And you'd be right.

But this was a deliberate choice. By being very simple, it's extremely flexible and highly compatible with a range of hardware, software and workflow options.

Advantages include…

• No special infrastructure (databases, services, etc) are required,
• Content can be created in a wide variety of simple tools,
• Editing can be performed via text-based methods such as SSH,
• Content can be backed up along-side the rest of your ARDI database,
• Content is compatible with a wide variety of version-management tools,
• The folder location can be overridden, allowing you to share a common set of content on network drives or cloud-synced storage.