External

Important

Unlike other methods, this method does not work incrementally: each time the source trace is modified, the whole computed trace is re-generated.

Also, this method can raise security issues, as it allows users to run arbitrary commands on the kTBS server. For this reason, this method is not anymore provided by default. It is available as a plugin, which must be explicitly enabled.

This method invokes an external program to compute a computed trace. The external program is given as a command line, expected to produce the obsels graph of the computed trace.

sources:

any number

parameters:

model:the model of the computed trace origin:the origin of the computed trace command-line:the command line to execute (required) format:the format expected and produced by the command line min-sources:the minimum number of sources expected by the command-line max-sources:the maximum number of sources expected by the command-line feed-to-stdin:whether to use the external command standard input (see below)

extensible:

yes (see below)

If parameter model (resp. origin) is not provided, the model (resp. origin) of the source trace will be used instead.

The command line query can contain magic strings of the form %(param_name)s, that will be replaced by the value of an additional parameter named param_name. Note that the following special parameters are automatically provided:

special parameter name	replaced by
__destination__	The URI of the computed trace.
__sources__	The space-separated list of the source traces’ URIs.

Parameter format is used to inform the kTBS of the format produced by the command line. Default is turtle.

Parameters min-sources and max-sources are used to inform the kTBS of the minimum (resp. maximum) number of sources traces expected by the command line. This is especially useful in user-defined methods, to control that the computed traces using them are consistent with their expectations.

In the general case, the command line is expected to receive the source trace(s) URI(s) as arguments, and query the kTBS to retrieve their obsels. As an alternative, parameter feed-to-stdin can be set to have the kTBS send the source trace obsels directly to the standard input of the external command process. Note that this is only possible when there is exactly one source, and the format used to serialize the obsels will be the same as parameter format.