Gnorm Solutions are pre-packaged sets of configuration files, templates, and static files that work together to produce code useful for a specific purpose. They are much like themes for static site generators such as Hugo or Jekyll.
Solutions offer an easy way to distribute a ready-to-use gnorm configuration for such things as generating Go or Python code to wrap a database, or generating protobuf definitions, or even a full REST API for the DB.
A solution is simply a gnorm.toml file, and any corresponding template files and static files used by that gnorm.toml. It is a good idea to put these files into a source control repo, since they will likely evolve over time.
A good default layout is to put the gnorm.toml file in the root of the repo, put templates in a subdirectory called “templates”, and put static files in a subdirectory called “static”. Ensure that the template paths in your gnorm.toml reference the template directory (e.g. “templates/foo.tpl”). Ensure the StaticDir property in the gnorm.toml is set to “static”.
It’s good practice to set OutputDir to something other than the current directory, so that users of the solution can delete the entire generated directory without worrying about losing anything. A good default for this directory name is simply “gnorm”. Of course, users of your solution may customize this name to whatever they want.
Gnorm solutions are often database-specific. How you interact with a mysql database is generally different than how you interact with a postgres database, for example.
To support multiple databases with the same solution, you will almost always need database-specific gnorm.toml files, and often need database-specific template files. The best way to provide a solution for multiple databases is to create a separate gnorm.toml for each database (called gnorm-postgres.toml etc), and then provide separate template directories for each configuration file, such as templates/postgres/ and templates/mysql, and separate static directories (if needed). The each db-specific config can then reference the db-specific templates and static files.
To use such a solution, the end user can then either rename the appropriate toml
file to gnorm.toml, or specify it on the command line with the -c option for
gnorm gen and gnorm preview.