I’ve been working on two new CKAN extensions that I’m really excited about. Since I helped build the custom metadata schema for open.canada.ca/ I’ve never been completely satisfied with the approach we took. These new extensions are the start of a proper solution to the compromises we made.
The new extensions are:
- ckanext-scheming data-driven custom schemas
- ckanext-fluent multilingual text fields
No programming required
ckanext-scheming provides a way to configure and share CKAN schemas using a JSON schema description that you turn on in your configuration file. This schema lets you customize all the fields and validation of your datasets without even needing to write a new extension in Python.
This is a generalization of the data-driven schema we used for open.canada.ca, but now it covers everything including validation rules ways of customizing form fields and the way fields are rendered.
All the languages
The always-bilingual nature of open.canada.ca/ was baked in to our extension in a way that makes it hard to separate. Also, it doesn’t extend to other languages and it’s hard to support harvesting from other CKAN instances with this approach.
I spent lots of time speaking to David Raznick about the best way to support multiple language versions of text fields and we settled on using JSON objects instead of strings for multilingual field values. These objects have BCP 47 language codes as keys and the text in those languages as values.
ckanext-fluent adds the necessary validators and template snippets to seamlessly integrate these multilingual fields into CKAN datasets.
Ongoing development
These extensions and many others are rapidly evolving and show the strength of what can be done with CKAN’s plugin architecture. Come join the CKAN technical team on IRC or mailing lists if you’re interested in helping.