openradtool

Consider an example ort(5) configuration db.ort. It defines three data objects—a user, company, and session—with relations between the three. Each session refers to a user by the userid field. Then each user refers to a company by its cid.

The ort(1) utility parses and validates the configuration. To do something with this configuration, we need to have code. Most applications start by creating an API from the data configuration as described in the next section.

This validation is superfluous, as all other tools validate during parse.

C, Rust, and Node.js back-ends are available. The Rust output is still somewhat experimental.

The Node.js backend currently lacks many of the security benefits of using the C API, such as privilege separation, but is the more widely-used of languages. The generated TypeScript code is built to work within npm applications. A full application example is available in ort-nodejs(1).

The C API files may be linked to sources (usually, but not necessarily) driving a kcgi(3) CGI script. Each function and structure in the header file is documented thoroughly. The source files are also documented, though more sparsely.

The Rust output is still experimental, but is able to interface with data models in a manner similar to the Node.js output. It does not yet have integrated documentation or validation.

Database upgrades are a pain: ort-sqldiff(1) programmatically tracks differences in the database schema. This allows for continuous testing of database compatibility. It also generates the correct SQL commands for properly upgrading an existing database without fear of ordering or missing field attributes.

(Update scripts should, however, always be perused for correctness.)

The last part of the toolchain is to handle the JSON-export output in the browser itself. The ort-javascript(1) tool will also generate TypeScript files to assist in filling in data for your front-end web application code.

Both are the same, and provide an easy interface for replacing elements (noted by class names) in HTML DOM trees with data. All of this is documented using tsdoc notation. For example, consider the following:

    1 <div id="foobar">
    2  User 
    3  <span class="user-email-text"></span>:
    4  company 
    5  <span class="user-company-obj">
    6   <span class="company-name-text"></span>.
    7  </span>
    8 </div>

A TypeScript file may invoke new ort.user(res).fill(document.getElementById('foobar')), where res is the JSON object parsed from an AJAX call to the CGI script. This will recursively replace text (classes ending with -text), fill in input values, and allow for extensive customisation.

The ort-javascript(1) tool is capable of filling in labels of exported enumeration and bitfield values. For example, if an exported field is of the enum foo type, and the enumeration's items have jslabel tags, integral enumeration values can be programmatically converted to the labels by invoking the ort.foo.format() method as a custom callback.

These strings may be translated by using the ort-xliff(1) utility, which extracts translatable strings into the industry-standard XLIFF 1.2 format. The translation files may then be merged back into the configuration file, with the output piped into ort-javascript(1), for a full translation sequence.

Arguably the most powerful feature of ort. Audit role-based access control access with ort-audit(1) and ort-audit-json(1): see the full availability of data and operations available to the role. Role compliance in ort is guaranteed by having separate jailed database and application processes.

In the example role-backed audit-example.ort with roles user and admin, for example, these tools can fully audit for the user role as seen in the exemplar audit.html created with ort-audit-json(1). This visualisation breaks down access by structures (the foundational objects of ort(5)) and then grouped by operation.