Grassroots Frictionless Data Tool

This is a command-line tool to extract the resources within a Frictionless Data Package into a variety of formats such as Markdown, HTML, CSV, etc. It will be available for as many different platforms as possible. It uses the schemas for each resource within the Data Package to generate the reports. It has in-built support for tabular-data-resources and will download and parse any web-based schemas from the resource profiles and use these when they are specified. It will output a file for each Data Resource within the Data Package.

Installation

The grassroots_fd_tool package can be downloaded from https://github.com/TGAC/grassroots-client-frictionless-data/releases/. Currently there are versions for Linux and Windows with more platforms to follow. For Linux, you will also need to install libcurl which you can do with

sudo apt install libcurl4-openssl-dev

or using a similar method depending upon your distribution.

Usage

Currently this is a shell-based tool so needs to be run in a Power Shell or DOS prompt on Windows or in a terminal on Linux. To run it type grassroots_fd_tool with the following command line parameters:

• --in <filename>: The Frictionless Data Package filename to extract the resources from.
• --out-dir <directory>: The directory where the output files will be written to.
• --data-fmt <format>: The format to write data resources in. Currently the options are:
  • html: Write the files in HTML format (default)
  • markdown: Write the files in Markdown format
• --table-fmt <format>: The format to write tabular data resources in. Currently the options are:
  • csv: Write the files in csv format (default)
• --full: If this is set, all key-value pairs are generated even when the values are missing. By default, any key-value pairs where the values are not set will not be added to the output files.
• --ver: Display the version information.

On Linux, you need to make sure that the required libraries are in the runtime library search path. You can so this using the enclosed run_grassroots_frictionless_data_tool.sh within the archive. Alternatively, you can type

cd <path to where you extracted the grassroots_fd_tool files> 
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:fd_libs

in a terminal and then you can use grassroots_fd_tool as above.

History

• 0.9.1 (2022/01/25): Fixed error messages saying "failed to parse" for child schemas when thay had actually succeeded
• 0.9.0 (2021/05/25): Initial version