Does or Can Substance support a "strict" concept of "schema" for documents ?

[Annakan]

Hello
I am returning to exploring substance has great basis for an online / collaborative editor.
I understand that you use the term "schema" in a very loose sense meaning more "collection of node types that can appear in a document" thane "structure of the document tree".

Is is possible (or do you think is is possible to implement ) a more "structured document schema" approach where some node can only appear in the context of some other nodes.

In a naive way this could be implemented by a test function canAppear(Parent_node_context) and/or a function allowedSubnodes()=>list of allowed subnodes types:.

The goal is to allow editing "strongly structured" documents where edition is guided by a schema, allowing for instance to have code-editor like shortcuts CTRL+space who display a contextual menu of the allowed sub nodes before continuing edition in place.
All of this subnodes would not have a "visual" effect (bold, etc, ) but could have a visual indication. For instance a node could be "law reference" (underlined in yellow) or "actor reference" (underlined in blue) displaying a law book name and position in it, or a the full tittle of a person, while storing a reference to an UUID to it ... etc ...

Maybe I missed this already or maybe substance is lower level and this needs to be build on it ...

Thanks a lot for your time.

[obuchtala]

Hey @Annakan
This is actually a tough problem which we are also experimenting with in the course of developing Texture (https://github.com/substance/texture).
Our approach is using an XML data schema, providing on-the-fly validation, but also real-time enabling/inhibition of UI elements according to the schema.
As you noticed, in the current version of substance this is not built-in -- this is our major goal for substance 2.0 (while 1.0 is not out yet ;) )
So, there is hope, but ATM it is still experimental. You could take a look at our latest development in Texture.

[obuchtala]

Just some more hints:
e.g. here we define a schema using RNG: https://github.com/substance/texture/blob/develop/src/article/JATS4R.rng

All models and converters are generated automatically.
Of course, the UI still needs to be implemented manually.
As you presumed, this is all built on top of the low-level API.

[gagarine]

@oliver---- can you provide a updated link?