opensafely / opensafely/documentation

Decouple this Repo from cohortextractor

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#705 2 comments 1 reaction 0 assignees View on GitHub

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enhancement
Dominant language
Python
Stars
48
Forks
10
Avg merge
2d 19h
Merged PRs (30d)
17

Description

We currently install cohortextractor and it's dependencies so we can use automated codegen tooling for pages such as the variable reference. This means the dev tooling is tied to cohortextractor's requirements, which are not entirely simple. It also couples cohortextractor to any requirements from this repo.

Databuilder avoided this coupling by exporting a JSON document with all necesssary docs data and having a plugin render it to markdown.

Now that we've proven the technique is workable with databuilder we can move cohortextractor to it as well.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

No files or tests are named. Start by tracing how this repository installs cohortextractor and generates the variable reference, then compare that flow with Databuilder's exported JSON and markdown-rendering plugin. Done means documentation generation no longer depends on cohortextractor's requirements while the variable reference and related pages still render correctly.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
python
Domain
documentation, tooling
Issue type
Refactor
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
30/100

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