This document describes the architecture of the API Blueprint parser (Drafter) and it's subcomponents.
Since API Blueprint is designed on top of Markdown, the smallest base of the parser contains a Markdown parser called Sundown which we use to create an AST of the markdown.
A node in the AST is made up of mdp::MarkdownNode from markdown-parser and depending on the the type of node, it can have children. This node will contain all the original data from the source document (including things like sourcemap).
Sos is a serialization helper library which serializes the given object into multiple formats like JSON and YAML.
Snowcrash takes the markdown AST and parses it into an internal structure defined in Blueprint.h.
snowcrash::parsetakes the document directly and creates the markdown AST
The output of snowcrash::parse is snowcrash::ParseResult which is basically nothing but a combination of snowcrash::Blueprint as node and snowcrash::BlueprintSourcemap as sourceMap along with report.
The source map format used in Snow Crash output is a set of semicolon-separated number pairs. Every pair represent a continuous range in the :<character index>:<character count> format.
Note a warning can span across several non-continuous blocks.
TODO: MSON Inheritance
TODO: Section Processor format
Drafter contains a CLI interface which takes in the API Blueprint document along with options and uses snowcrash internally to get a snowcrash::ParseResult. This parse result is then converted into internal refract representation format by drafter::WrapRefract.
TODO: Refract library
All the MSON is expanded with drafter::ExpandRefract during the conversion which is used to generate the JSON Schema/Body for Payloads that contained Attributes.
The whole refract tree is then serialized into sos::Object from drafter::SerializeRefract which is then converted into appropriate format as requested.