Setting up imports

Any building blocks repository can import any other repository, so that references by id to building blocks (e.g. inside schemas, in bblock.json, etc.) belonging to the imported repositories can be automatically resolved.

Repository imports can be defined as an array of URLs to the output register.json of other repositories inside bblocks-config.yaml:

• If imports is missing from bblocks-config.yaml, the main OGC Building Blocks repository will be imported by default.
• default can be used instead of a URL to refer to the main OGC Building Blocks repository.
• If imports is an empty array, no repositories will be imported.

For example, the following will import two repositories, one of them being the main OGC Building Blocks repository:

name: Repository with imports
imports:
  - default
  - https://example.com/bbr/build/register.json

Note: If the URL ends with build/register.json or register.json, you may omit the last part. For example, when https://example.com/bbr is provided as an import, these URLs will be tried:

• https://example.com/bbr
• https://example.com/bbr/build/register.json
• https://example.com/bbr/register.json

The first URL to return a valid register.json will be used.

Local URL mappings (for testing)

Sometimes, a remote repository may not be available publicly (e.g., for security reasons). In that case, URL-to-local-path mappings can be added inside an url-mappings object in a bblocks-config-local.yml file, like so:

url-mappings:
  'https://example.com/bbr/': '/imports/ogc/bblock-prov-schema'
  'https://example.com/relative/': '../../ogc/bblock-prov-schema'

This will redirect all requests to https://example.com/bbr/... to the /imports/ogc/bblock-prov-schema/... path, and https://example.com/relative/... to ../../ogc/bblock-prov-schema/...; for example, https://example.com/bbr/path/to/file.txt will correspond to /imports/ogc/bblock-prov-schema/path/to/file.txt.

When running the bblocks-postprocess Docker container, these additional repository copies need to be made available to it as mounted volumes:

 -v "$(pwd)/../../ogc/bblock-prov-schema:/imports/ogc/bblock-prov-schema"

If you are using build.sh as suggested in Local Build, you can automate the volumes that will be mounted in the docker command by creating a .volumes file in which each line will represent a <local path>:<container mount path> pair. For example:

/absolute/path/to/mount:/mount/absolute
../relative/path:/mount/relative

When you run build.sh, the .volumes file will be parsed and the volumes will be mounted.