DoTS-vue

DoTS-vue is the reading front-end of the DoTS suite: a single-page application that turns a DoTS endpoint into a publication site for TEI editions — collections to browse, documents to read, metadata to inspect, facsimiles to look at, and a search page when the corpus has been indexed.

It is deliberately small. The application holds no editorial choice of its own: what a site looks like, what it calls things, which metadata it shows, how its documents are cut up and rendered, all of it comes from a settings repository kept outside the code and plugged in at build time. One codebase therefore serves many sites, and no site inherits another's decisions.

SEE IT RUNNING

The DoTS Cookbook is a DoTS-vue deployment. Its settings are public — dots-vue-demo-settings — and documented on their own site.

Where it sits

The components of the suite are independent of one another, and each is a separate deployment decision. DoTS-vue plugs straight into a DoTS endpoint: that single connection is all it requires.

ThunderDots, dots-cli-es and its search API form a branch a corpus may never take. Skip it and the site still browses the collections, reads the documents, shows the metadata and displays the facsimiles — it simply has no search page, and says so rather than failing.

       TEI corpus
            │
            ▼
    ┌───────────────┐
    │     DoTS      │   DTS API: collections, resources, navigation, documents
    └───────┬───────┘
            │
            ├───────────────────────────────┐
            │                               │
            │  optional: indexing           │  DTS over HTTP
            ▼                               │  (always)
    ┌───────────────┐                       │
    │  ThunderDots  │                       │
    └───────┬───────┘                       │
            ▼                               │
    ┌───────────────┐                       │
    │  dots-cli-es  │                       │
    └───────┬───────┘                       │
            ▼                               │
    ┌───────────────┐                       │
    │    dots-api   │                       │
    └───────┬───────┘                       │
            │  only for the search page     │
            └───────────────┬───────────────┘
                            ▼
                    ┌───────────────┐
                    │   DoTS-vue    │   ← this project
                    └───────┬───────┘
                            │  static build
                            ▼
                     the published site
                            ▲
                            │  build-time alias `confs`
                 ┌──────────────────────┐
                 │  your-settings-repo  │
                 └──────────────────────┘

Two shapes of deployment

Reading only — a DoTS endpoint, DoTS-vue, and a settings repository. Nothing to index, nothing to keep in sync, no Elasticsearch to run.

Reading and searching — the same, plus a corpus indexed by dots-es-cli and a dots-api served next to it. Adding it later changes nothing on the reading side: a search endpoint in the environment and a route in the settings are enough.

Two services, then, and one repository:

	Role	Required
DoTS endpoint	collections, navigation, documents, metadata	yes
dots-api search endpoint	the search page and, where available, the collection lists	no
settings repository	everything editorial	yes

Your collection website made easy

A browsable corpus. Collections are rendered as a table of contents, as a table, as cards or as a mix, each collection choosing for itself. Sub-collections open in place, and the breadcrumb follows the DTS tree however deep it goes. Cards are the mode for moving between projects, so a deployment serving a single corpus browses with the other three — see Configuration.

A reader. A document arrives from the endpoint either as TEI or as HTML, and is laid out in three parts — the navigation, the text, the apparatus — each of which a deployment can style or replace. See Reading a document.

A facsimile viewer. When a resource carries a IIIF manifest, Mirador is embedded beside the text, and the page breaks of the transcription drive it: turning to a page in the text turns the image.

Metadata on demand. The metadata panel is built from the JSON-LD the endpoint returns, expanded against the declared namespaces, then filtered, ordered and relabelled by the settings.

A search page, if the collection has been indexed by dots-cli-es and declares it in its settings: full text, facets, temporal sliders, and a results table whose columns the settings choose.

A theme. Colours, fonts, logos, favicon and the whole TEI stylesheet are settings, not code, and a deployment can add its own CSS on top. See Theme and styling.

Getting started

1. Install the application and its dependencies.
2. Configure the endpoints it talks to.
3. Run or build it against a settings repository.
4. Deploy the static output.

To write the settings themselves, follow the DoTS-vue settings documentation — this site documents the application, that one documents what you feed it.