This library offers a unified api to export tool description formats like CTD or CWL.

The current CLI interfaces of OpenMS andi SeqAn3 are very different. Using the same command line parsing library is currently (2022) not feasible for these projects. While OpenMS already has support for CTD both are missing support for CWL. The idea is to replace the CTD exporter of OpenMS with the TDL implementation and integrating TDL into SeqAn3. As a next step TDL will gain support for CWL and with (hopefully) minimal code adjustments this will give OpenMS and SeqAn3 based tools easy access to CWL tool description support.

At the core of TDL is the ToolInfo structure. It consist of three values:

struct ToolInfo {
    MetaInfo                meta{};
    std::vector<Node>       params{};
    std::vector<CLIMapping> cliMapping{};
};

Where ToolInfo carries

• meta data about the tool
• a tree of parameters struct Node
• a tree of mapping from parameters to CLI prefixes.

The Node class is defined as:

struct Node {
   using Children = std::vector<Node>;
   using Value = std::variant<BoolValue,          // just a single bool value
                              IntValue,           // single int, double or string value
                              DoubleValue,
                              StringValue,
                              IntValueList,       // list of int, double or string values
                              DoubleValueList,
                              StringValueList,
                              Children>;          // not a value, but a node with children

   std::string name{};           //!< Name of the entry.
   std::string description{};    //!< Entry description.
   std::set<std::string> tags{}; //!< List of tags, e.g.: advanced parameter tag.
   Value value{Children{}};      //!< Current value of this entry
};

A CWL file is generated by calling convertToCWL

auto toolInfo = ToolInfo {
    ...
};
auto cwlAsString = convertToCWL(toolInfo);
std::cout << cwlAsString;

• Detailed Example
• Complete Example

• string values with tags {"input", "file"}, {"output", "file"} or {"output", "prefix"} are exported as CTD typed values input-file, output-file or output-prefix. The list valid string values are interpereted as supported_formats`
• list of string values with tags {"input", "file"} or {"output", "file"} are exported as CTD typed values input-file or output-file. The list valid string values are interpereted as supported_formats

The following tags and tags combination have a special meaning

• {"file"}: If used with tdl::StringValue a single input file, if used with tdl::StringValueList it represents a list of input files.
• {"directory"}: Same as the tag file but with directories.
• {"file", "output"}, A single or a list of input files (depending if tdl::StringValue or tdl::StringValueList)
• {"directory", "output"}: Same as {"file", "directory"} but for directories.
• {"prefixed", "output"}: A partial path, that is used as a prefix. If used with tdl::StringValue this signals only a single file will be created. If used with tdl::StringValueList it signals that multiple files might be created.
• {"basecommand"}: If used with tdl::Node::Children the value will be appended to the list of base-commands e.g.: build of raptor build ...