Books and FixoLibrary

Reference for how Fixo resources are stored, discovered, and exposed to the UI.

One sentence summary

FixoLibrary is a coordinator that scans two directories — built-in (read-only, ships with the app) and custom (per-personality, user-editable) — for fixo.json files, and exposes seven Books for the typed CRUD interface the manager UIs use.

The seven Books

All Books share the same abstract interface (FixoBook):

QStringList list();              // names of items in this book
T           get(const QString&); // item by name (T is book-specific)
T           create(const QString&);
bool        rename(const QString& oldName, const QString& newName);
T           duplicate(const QString& name);
bool        remove(const QString& name);
bool        importFile(const QString& path);
bool        exportFile(const QString& name, const QString& path);
bool        isBuiltin(const QString& name);

So once you know the pattern from one Book, the others work the same way.

Read-only built-ins

Items with "builtin": true in their fixo.json are read-only at the UI layer:

• FixoBook::isBuiltin(name) returns true
• remove() on a built-in returns false and leaves the book unchanged
• rename() on a built-in is rejected
• The manager activities disable the destructive buttons in the UI

To customise a built-in, duplicate it — duplicate() produces a writable copy with "builtin": false that you can then edit and rename.

FixoLibrary configuration

FixoLibrary lib;
lib.configure(builtinDir, customDir);  // both directories
lib.scan();                             // recursive walk + route by fixoType

After scan(), the Books are populated. rescan() re-walks the trees if files have changed on disk (the manager UIs call this when import succeeds).

The two directories are convention:

Custom items can override built-ins by name; the override is preferred when both exist.

Import / export

Every Book exposes file-shaped I/O:

book->importFile("/path/to/something.fixo.json");
book->exportFile("hexy-explorer", "/tmp/share.fixo.json");

The format is the same fixo.json schema described here. Round-trip preserves all fields except the builtin flag, which is forced to false on import (you can't import a built-in into your custom set — it would be redundant).

The Studio's manager activities expose Import / Export buttons that wire to these methods automatically. See Share a preset between nodes for the user-facing workflow.

Per-node, per-personality

Each personality on each node has its own <personality>/fixo/ tree, so Hub, Agent, and Remote can independently author and tweak presets. Sharing happens via Import / Export today; an automatic Book-transfer courier is on the roadmap (it'll wrap the same import/export in a courier-driven blob transfer).

Source code

See also

• Fixo Data Model — what each Book stores
• fixo.json schema — the file format
• Fixo Studio — the UI that exposes Books to users
• Share a preset between nodes — Import / Export how-to