Conkeldurr: Lightweight CSV-to-React Build-Time Content Organisation System

Summary

This is a domain specific language powered by OCaml that bridges CSV (and soon, maybe other) data into TypeScript files with specific variable names and ordering for build-time importing by a React app, i.e. a build-time content organisation system.

The goal of this project is to stream CSV data as a build-time CDN into a React app. Obviously, the data can be put as

export const DATA = whatever

in some .ts file, but that can be difficult to maintain. A spreadsheet is a lot easier.

While that is quite trivial, organisation of some of these values may require specific control over formatting. Therefore, this is a compiler that bridges an s-expression based language to TypeScript:

((ReadConstant ((value (String "ABCDEF")) (var "thing")))
 (ReadConstant ((value (Integer 123)) (var "thing2")))
 (ReadVariable ((value (Float 3.14)) (var "thing3")))
 (ReadSpreadsheet ((var "spreadsheet_123") (interface "INTERFACE_123") (path (Csv "./hello"))))
 (Export Stdout))

and converts it into the file some_file.ts that looks like

export const thing: string = “ABCDEF”;
export const thing2: number = 123;
export let thing3: number = 123;

export interface INTERFACE_123 = {
	…
}

export const spreadsheet_123: Array<INTERFACE_123> = [
	{...},
	{...},
	{...},
]

To support types, CSV headers are comma-separated s-expressions like

(String colname),(Number colname2)

Todo

• Implement joins between spreadsheets
• Implement enum types
• Improve error messages to be less dense
• Quotes in CSV rows cause a crash