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SaiLoR — Developer Documentation

SaiLoR is a tool for reviewers conducting Systematic Literature Reviews (SLR) — the letters are in the name: SaiLoR. A single JSON "project" file holds both the annotation schema (a nested, cardinality-controlled taxonomy) and the papers to annotate; the app renders each paper's PDF beside a form generated from that schema, and writes the annotations back into the same file.

One codebase ships two ways: an Electron desktop app and a static web SPA. That split is the thing to understand first — most of the architecture exists to keep the React tree identical across both, with a PlatformAdapter seam absorbing everything that differs — file dialogs, PDF loading, saving.

This wiki is the developer documentation. If you are here to use SaiLoR — installing a release, authoring a project file, annotating a paper — start with the README instead.

Contents

Page	What it covers
Quickstart	What SaiLoR is, the tech stack, the commands you actually need, and the repository layout. Start here.
Architecture	The PlatformAdapter seam, the Zustand stores and undo/redo, the component tree, the Electron main process, and how the build is wired.
Data Model	The project file format, the in-memory types, and the load → normalize → edit → prune → serialize lifecycle that keeps a hand-edited JSON safe.
Operations	Developing, building, testing, CI, releasing the desktop installers, deployment (static / Docker / Electron), and how these wiki pages are kept in sync.

How this wiki is maintained

Do not treat this wiki as the original. These pages live in openwiki/ in the main repository and are mirrored here by a GitHub Action; the folder is the source of truth, and publishing replaces the wiki rather than merging into it.

Editing a page here is still fine: a second Action imports wiki edits back into openwiki/ and commits them to main, so the two do not drift. See Operations → Wiki sync for the mechanics — including why the two Actions cannot trigger each other in a loop.