uat-chooser

A widget for choosing concepts from the Unified Astronomy Thesaurus (UAT). It currently looks like this:

We host a live version of the widget on the UAT website:

http://astrothesaurus.org/concept-select/

The original code was donated by eJournalPress. This module is maintained by the American Astronomical Society.

Usage

See dist/index.html for a minimal example webpage that will demonstrate the concept chooser.

We don’t currently host a world-accessible version of the UAT chooser, so if you want to embed it in your own website, you must build and upload it yourself. To do so, run

$ npm install
$ npm run build

and then copy the contents of the dist/ directory, minus index.html, to your web server. Tweak the sample HTML and embed it in your webpage as appropriate.

To test the local code in a web browser, you can launch a webserver that serves static files from the dist/ directory. There are many ways to do this. We suggest:

$ npx http-server -p 8000 dist

Then navigate your browser to http://localhost:8000/.

TODO: show how to extract the list of selected keywords!

Deployment

AAS hosts a static deployment of the chooser at:

https://aasjournals.github.io/uat-chooser/

This static deployment is hosted through GitHub Pages from the gh-pages branch of this repo.

We should really automate deployment on merges to master, and we used to do so, but the automation was based on Travis CI which is now basically nonfunctional. To deploy manually:

$ git clean -fxd
$ npm install
$ npm run build
$ git switch gh-pages
$ rm -rf node_modules dist/.gitignore dist/combined.js *.png *.gif *.js
$ mv dist/* .
$ git add .
$ git ci -m "Deploy updates"
$ git push
$ git switch master

Technical details

The widget is based on the script.aculo.us library, which in turn is built on the Prototype framework. These are both rather out-of-date compared to current JavaScript trends.

In a perhaps vain effort to adapt the code to a more modern JavaScript style, I (@pkgw) have made some efforts toward wrapping the widget in a standard npm package using webpack. However, the Prototype library makes various modifications to the global JavaScript interpreter namespace, so (as far as I can tell) this package can’t be transparently integrated into a regular Web dependency stack so long as it remains built on script.aculo.us. (Prototype makes some gnarly use of arguments.callee that further mean that we can’t run in Strict mode.)

What I’ve set up here is an npm run build command that will combine the widget code with the script.aculo.us modules that it uses. That way, the only special thing you need to do is to make sure to load prototype.js before loading this package.

The main output file created by the npm run build command is dist/uat-chooser.js. This module is built in Webpack’s library mode, so that if you load it in a webpage it will create a global variable named uat_chooser that represents the module. That module currently has one API entry point, uat_chooser.default.ejpUatAutocompleterInit(divid). This function takes the ID of a <div class="uat-widget"> element that will be set up with the UAT concept-choosing interface.

Legalities

The original code was donated by Precision Computer Works, Inc. / eJournalPress to the American Astronomical Society. Licensed under the MIT License.