BIDS-Validator

Support

The BIDS Validator is designed to work in both the browser and in Node.js. We target support for the latest long term stable (LTS) release of Node.js and the latest version of Chrome.

Please report any issues you experience while using these support targets. If you experience issues outside of these supported environments and believe we should extend our targeted support feel free to open a new issue describing the issue, your support target and why you require extended support and we will address these issues on a case by case basis.

Use

API

The BIDS Validator has one primary method that takes a directory as either a path to the directory (node) or the object given by selecting a directory with a file input (browser), an options object, and a callback.

Available options include:

• ignoreWarnings - (boolean - defaults to false)
• ignoreNiftiHeaders - (boolean - defaults to false)

For example:

validate.BIDS(directory, {ignoreWarnings: true}, function (errors, warnings) {console.log(errors, warnings);});

If you would like to test individual files you can use the file specific checks that we expose.

• validate.BIDS()
• validate.JSON()
• validate.TSV()
• validate.NIFTI()

In the Browser

The BIDS Validator currently works in the browser with browserify. You can add it to a browserify project by cloning the validator and requiring it with browserify syntax var validate = require('bids-validator');.

On the Server

The BIDS validator works like most npm packages. You can install it by running npm install bids-validator.

Through Command Line

If you install the bids validator globally by using npm install -g bids-validator you will be able to use it as a command line tool. Once installed you should be able to run bids-validator /path/to/your/bids/directory and see any validation issues logged to the terminal. Run bids-validator without a directory path to see available options.

Development

To develop locally, clone the project and run npm install from the project root. This will install external dependencies.

Running Locally in a Browser

A note about OS X, the dependencies for the browser require a npm package called node-gyp which needs xcode to be installed in order to be compiled.

1. Create a separate directory with the gh-pages branch in it.
2. The local version of the validator needs to be added to npm. This is done through the command npm --save relative/path/to/bids-validator.
3. In the gh-pages package.json file replace bids-validator: "latest" with bids-validator: "relative/path/to/bids-validator so if the normal bids-validator project is in the same directory as the gh-pages project this line would read `bids-validator: "../bids-validator". This will install your local version of the bids-validator project instead of going to the central npm repository.
4. The default gh-pages application minifies javascript. This make it difficult to test things locally. To disable minification of javascript comment out the line .pipe(uglify()) in gulpfule.js
5. In the gh-pages directory execute npm install and then gulp build this will install all the dependencies of the bids-validator browser application and build it.
6. Any subsequent changes to the bids-validator will require the source to be reinstalled and the gh-pages application rebuilt. From the gh-pages directory a one liner to do this is rm -rv node_modules/bids-validator/ && npm install && gulp build The rm removes the installed version of bids-validator, npm install will recopy it from your local repositroy, and then finally the gulp rebuild.
7. Via Chrome you can now open the index.html in gh-pages generated by gulp.

Testing

To start the test suite run npm test from the project root.

To run the linter which checks code conventions run npm run lint.