1. Introduction

SPedit should provide a facility to set up and save user preferences with a hierarchy that is common to many Unix programs: First there is a system-wide definition of properties, which can be overridden by settings saved in the home directory and further overridden via command line arguments.

2. Details

The general directory structure should look like this:

• Global preferences:
  /usr/local/share/SPedit (Unix and Mac?), C:\Programs\SPedit (Windows)
• Directory structure:
  
• Extensions:
  Contains various jar files that also contain plugins related to specific doctyped (e.g. SP-ML-Helper.jar, Blastsearch-Tool.jar, Interpro-View.jar , etc. )
• Styles:
  Contains XSS stylesheets for the different available doctypes.
• Views:
  Defines the view information of the various doctypes.
• Preferences.xml is the editor main configuration type.
• Alternative directory structure:
  
• Sets:
  The Sets directory contains subdirectories which represent each installed Doctypes. Each set is composed of the following items:
• The main configuration file Configuration.xml which can be split in many sub-files (e.g. Styles.xss, Views.xml, Document.xml )
• A jar containing the custom extensions (custom views, helpers, etc.)
• An initialization script initialization.py that defines customizes the editor UI, and provides post-instanciation configuration facility for views.
• Personal preferences:
  Has the same structure, is stored either as $HOME/.spedit (Unix and Mac), C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\SPedit (Windows NT/2000/XP), C:\Windows\SPedit (Windows 95/98)

3. Comments

This preferences contains information about the editor in general, but also specifically for a certain document type. General information will be stored in the SPedit-Prefs.xml file and information specific to a document type is stored in the according subdirectory, for example if there are style definition for SP-ML, they should be stored in a file called SP-ML.xml in the Styles subdirectory.

Another example is a special (hypothetical) view for Interpro, which displays the Interpro hits in a nice way. The configureation file for the view is stored in the views subdirectory, while the classes implementing the view are stored in the extensions directory.