The configuration file: 'docnet.json'

DocNet uses a json file to determine what to do in what form. The format is straight forward and described below

{
    "Name" : "name of site",
    "Source" : "sourcefolder",
    "Destination" : "destinationfolder",
    "IncludeSource": "includefolder",
    "Theme" : "themefolder",
    "SourceFoldersToCopy" : ["folder1", "foldern"],
    "Footer" : "footer text or HTML",
    "Pages" : 
    {
        "__index" : "index.md",
        "Title Page 1": "filename_page1.md", 
        "Title Page 2": "filename_page2.md",
        "Sub Header 1": 
        {
            "__index" : "index.md",
            "Title Page 3" : "filename_page3.md",
            "Title Page 4" : "filename_page4.md"
        }
    }
}

The order in which the pages are specified is the order in which they'll appear in the navigation.

• Name specifies the name of the site to generate.
• Source specifies the root of the tree of folders in which markdown files are expected. sourcefolder can be a relative path or an absolute path and is used as the root folder for filenames specified in Pages.
• Destination specifies the folder where the output will be written to (.htm files). The output will be written to this folder only, all files from subfolders in Source will be written to the folder specified in Destination. with the same structure as the navigation in Pages. destinationfolder can be a relative path or an absolute path.
• IncludeSource specifies the folder where the files specified to be included using @@include directives are located. If IncludeSource isn't specified, the value Includes is assumed.
• Theme specifies the folder within the Themes folder in the folder the docnet executable is located which is used as the theme for the pages to generate. Docnet expects a file called PageTemplate.htm within the specified Theme folder, which contains the HTML which is used as the wrapper file for the HTML generated from the markdown. It has to contain a couple of marker, which are described later in this document. If Theme isn't specified, Default is assumed.
• SourceFoldersToCopy. This is an optional directive with, if specified, one or more folder names relative to Source, which contain files to copy to the Destination folder. E.g. image files used in the markdown files, located in an Images folder can be copied this way to the output folder reliably. All folders specified are copied recursively.
• Footer. This is text and/or HTML which is placed in the footer of each page, using a marker (see below).
• Pages contains the pages to generate into the output, in the order and structure in which you want them to appear in the navigation. The name given is the value used in the navigation tree and has to be unique per level. The value specified with each name is the markdown file to load, parse and generate as .htm file in the output. The markdown file is relative to the path specified in Source. A file foo.md will be generated as foo.htm in the output.

Paths are expected to use \ characters, and as it's json, you have to escape them, so the path .\foo becomes .\\foo.

Each level, starting with the root, has a special page defined, __index. This page is the page shown when the level header (in the example above this is e.g. Sub Header 1) is clicked in the navigation. If __index is specified in the root level, it's assigned to the navigation name Home. If there's no __index specified, there will still be a page generated but it will have default content (See below). The names of the elements are case sensitive.

Levels without __index defined

If a level has no __index defined, DocNet will create a __index entry for the level and will specify as target <path to index of parent>/nameoflevel.md. If the page exists it will be loaded as the content for the index of the level, if it doesn't exist, the HTML will simply contain the topictitle and a list of all the sub topics in the level. This guarantees the tree can always be navigated in full.