Detecting Blueprint Files in Plugin ZIPs

[namithj]

This is related to aspirepress/AspireExplorer#98

Right now plugin authors can add a blueprint.json file in an assets folder in the root of the plugin to specify playground related configurations.

For this to be loadable on a playground instance this json file needs to be publicly accessible and we also need a mechanism to check for the existence of this file without having to unzip the package each time.

A possible solution is to add a link to the json file from the source where the package is zipped so that we can check for it and trigger a playground instance, we can also host the file somewhere but there might be links to images etc from the assets folder making this difficult.

Need to figure out a solution to tackle this.

[chuckadams]

It's as simple as looking at the zip file's table of contents to see if the file is in there, but the sticky part is that AC only ever downloads files from the origin on demand. Having this info populated ahead of time for AE to know whether to display an "open in playground" link or not would mean downloading everything ahead of time, but since AspireBuild will be doing that anyway, we can have AB extract and upload the blueprint.json file separately and attach it as package metadata in the new labeling service that will be built out in issue #377

Given that AB's design is still incubating, we could implement this first as a script within AC, then move it to AB once we have the mechanism designed for AB to communicate metadata back to AC (probably as a message relayed through AspireSync in some fashion). Meantime, it's much easier and faster to start with the direct approach instead of waiting for two other systems to be designed or redesigned.

And as averse as I normally am to extending the .org metadata format, I wouldn't be opposed to adding a blueprint_url field to the metadata, and we might even want to get that included in upstream itself, assuming anyone is still manning the stations in the .org submission pipeline code. Might be better as a section though: thoughts?

[namithj]

The blueprint_url will work for our purpose.

.org process is a toggle switch to enable previews on the front end of the repository which authors have to manually do after adding the blueprint.json file.

[chuckadams]

I'm now leaning toward making this an AspireBuild thing from the start, since it's a textbook use case in how we should extend the metadata generator as well as publish assets such as screenshots, icons, and playground blueprints. I should be landing a POC implementaton for AB within a week that implements a couple use cases, and we can start sketching out an asset pipeline that includes blueprint.json.