When I’m not writing about writing code, I occasionally get to hop into a terminal and tear out a few lines of code. While Ramona was a bit of a bust that needs to revisit the drawing board before its ready to leave the nest, Virgil has taken off. Virgil is something I’ve been doing in-between other tasks with the sole purpose of allowing users to edit and manage CodeLists managed in DDI. This is based on work I did mid-last year to turn DDI Code and Category Schemes into interactive webpages. To support this I’ve been working on a tool to allow users to properly edit Codelists in DDI.

A CodeList is a combination of two DDI objects, a CodeScheme and a CategoryScheme and enables users to manage complex hierarchies of coded information, as small as codifiying “Yes/No” responses to managing large industrial classifications.

To demonstrate how this may be done, I’ve uploaded a screencast of Virgil-UI in action opening a DDI version of the coded hierarchy from the Australian and New Zealand Standard Industrial Classification (ANZSIC) editing and saving the file.

The video demonstration is available on youtube – here.

The video got downscaled when it was uploaded (pressing the expand button helps) but for those having trouble understanding whats in the video, the features demo’d in the video are:

  • Open the ANZLIC DDI File in the Vim text editor and searching for the term “LOOK HERE”. This search term isn’t in the file… yet
  • Virgil-UI is run and the same file is loaded
  • Data from the DDI File for a Category is loaded and is displayed in English and German
  • The term “LOOK HERE” is added to the description of a category and the file is saved
  • The file is then reloaded in the Vim text editor and the term “LOOK HERE” searched for
  • The search term “LOOK HERE” is found

When ready (hopefully mid-August for open-beta) Virgil-UI will be released under an free open-source licence and will support the following features – ** Indicates a feature that is fully or partially implemented already

** Complete multilingual support, for both the UI and multilingual DDI files.

** DDI3.x file support

** Full rich-text editing for DDI Descriptions and Labels

** Support for Windows, Mac and Linux

  • Export support for Virgil-Web an existing tool for generating Web-pages from DDI CodeLists

  • Import from CSV

  • Drag-and-drop re-ordering of CodeLists

Planned features after the initial release include:

  • DDI2.x file support

  • DDI3.x support from a custom-built repository

  • DDI3.x support from a Colectica repository