homelable/docs/documentation.md

Documentation

A markdown document per device, plus a free-form Library of pages and folders, behind the Documentation entry in the left sidebar.

Before this, the only writing surface in Homelable was device_inventory.notes — one TEXT column rendered as plain text. This replaces it with something that can be structured, linked, searched and kept honest, without ever throwing the old notes away.

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The model

Three tables. See docs/database-model.md for the columns.

Table	What
documents	One markdown document. Either a Library page/folder, or a device / node / design document describing exactly one thing.
document_revisions	Prior bodies, pruned to the most recent 50 per document.
documents_fts	The FTS5 search index. Optional — see Search below.

A document attaches to the device, not to the node. Since 3.3.0 a node draws a device and the facts live on device_inventory, so one device reads the same on every canvas it appears on.

Every link is SET NULL and the title is denormalized. Deleting a device or a canvas never destroys what was written: the document survives as an orphan and can be re-linked or filed into the Library. Foreign keys are off in this SQLite setup, so the delete paths clear the columns by hand through app/services/doc_links.py::unlink_documents — nodes, scan and designs each call it before they delete.

A folder is a document (kind='folder'). That is what allows an empty folder, and lets a folder carry an index body.

One document per target. Enforced twice: a 409 in the route, and partial unique indexes created in init_db (DOCUMENT_DDL in db/database.py — create_all cannot express a partial index or a virtual table).

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The generated header

app/services/doc_template.py scaffolds a device document from the live facts: addresses, hardware, one section per fingerprinted service, rack and zone placement, canvas neighbours, custom properties. Old notes are appended verbatim under ## Notes behind an HTML-comment provenance marker.

It is generated once and then belongs to the user. Nothing rewrites a body that already exists. Two things keep it from going stale silently:

• facts_snapshot records the facts as they read at generation time, so the UI can say the device has changed and list what.
• GET /api/v1/documents/blocks?block=…&device_id=… renders any single block on demand — that is what the editor's /device, /services, /rack… commands insert. Regeneration is always one keystroke away, and never automatic.

A section whose data is empty is still emitted, with an italic prompt: the document is a checklist of what has not been written yet. Sections that are structural rather than descriptive — the rack position of an unracked device — are dropped instead.

Service URLs in a document follow frontend/src/utils/serviceUrl.ts, including its non-HTTP port denylist, so a link in a document is the link the canvas offers.

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The tree

Two roots, with different natures.

Devices is a pivot, rebuilt client-side in frontend/src/documentation/tree.ts from data the app already holds. Grouping by zone, group, type, physical/virtual, subnet, canvas, rack, vendor, discovery source, status, tag, or flat A–Z is instant and needs no server round trip.

• Zone and group come from walking parent_id up to the nearest groupRect / group node.
• Subnet prefers a configured scanner range, else the address's own /24. A device with several IPs appears under each subnet it reaches.
• Physical / Virtual / Host is derived: vm/lxc/docker_container are virtual, proxmox/docker_host and anything drawn as a container are hosts.
• Canvas answers "on the loaded canvas or not" — the app only holds one at a time.

Library is the real folder tree, ordered by sort_order then title.

Badges: · no document, ○ only the generated header, ● written, ⚠ the device changed since, ⏰ past its review_every.

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Editing

Markdown source on the left, live preview on the right. Source rather than a rich editor on purpose: the body is exported verbatim, so what is typed is what the file holds.

Saving is explicit — Ctrl/Cmd+S or the Save button — matching the canvas rule that nothing persists on a timer. An unsaved body is mirrored to localStorage under homelable_docdraft:<id> on every keystroke and cleared on save. On reopening, a draft taken against the version being opened is offered; a draft taken against an older version is discarded, because replaying it would revert a change made elsewhere.

/ at the start of a line opens the insert menu: the generated blocks above, plus table, checklist, callout, wiki-link and date.

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Links between documents

[[device:nas-01]], [[doc:vlan-plan]], [[node:<id>]], or a bare [[VLAN plan]]; [[…|label]] sets the text. A device resolves by id or label, a document by id, slug, then title, all case-insensitively. An unresolved link renders red and offers to create the document.

Parsed as a text pass over the rendered children (wikilinks.ts + markdown/WikiText.tsx) rather than as a remark plugin, so the file stays ordinary markdown for anything else that reads it.

Raw HTML is deliberately not rendered — rehype-raw is absent — so a document cannot inject markup and no sanitiser is needed.

Backlinks

Every document lists what points at it, under Linked from, with the line the link was written on and the label it was written as.

The inversion is done server-side (services/doc_backlinks.py, GET /documents/{id}/backlinks), because the browser holds no bodies but the open one: GET /documents is metadata-only so the tree can badge without downloading the space. That service mirrors the resolution rules in wikilinks.ts — same prefixes, same id → slug → title fallback, same case-insensitivity — the way the generator's service_url mirrors utils/serviceUrl.ts. Change one and change the other; test_doc_backlinks.py pins the rules.

Repeated links from the same document collapse into one entry with a count, and a document never backlinks itself. The inventory is only loaded when some body actually carries a [[device:…]].

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History

Every explicit save that changes the body snapshots the previous one, capped at REVISION_LIMIT (50) per document; so do restore, regenerate, scaffold and the notes migration, each recording why.

The clock-arrow button in the header opens the history rail: what each version was (Saved, Regenerated, Restored, Migrated from notes…), when, and how big. Selecting one replaces the body with that version — same title, same chips, same rail — and Changes turns it into a line diff against the current body, with long unchanged runs collapsed. Restore brings it back, snapshotting the body it replaces first, so a restore is itself undoable.

A revision's body is fetched only when it is opened: the list carries a size, not the text, so fifty versions cost one small request.

The diff is a plain LCS over lines (documentation/diff.ts), after the common head and tail are trimmed — no diff library, and a pathological pair of long, wholly different bodies degrades to "replaced wholesale" instead of building a 250k-cell matrix.

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Search

GET /api/v1/documents/search?q= over title, tags and body.

FTS5 is not assumed: the SQLite shipped in the LXC and Docker images may be built without it, the same reason database.py avoids JSON1. doc_search.py probes once and falls back to LIKE, and the response says which engine answered (fts5 or like) so the UI can drop snippet highlighting. The index is maintained from Python on every write — no triggers — and _reindex_documents_fts catches up on boot after an upgrade or a restored backup.

User input is never FTS5 syntax: build_match_query quotes every term, so an IP or a stray quote is data.

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Migrating the old notes

Non-destructive and repeatable.

1. GET /api/v1/documents/coverage reports notes_unmigrated.
2. A banner offers to migrate.
3. POST /api/v1/documents/scaffold {"only_with_notes": true} creates one document per device, old notes appended verbatim, with a migrate revision.
4. device_inventory.notes is left exactly as it was. It is still the column the HACS integration, the YAML export, the MCP tools and the canvas search read. Deprecating it is a separate decision.

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API

Method	Path
GET	/api/v1/documents — metadata only, filterable by kind, parent_id, device_id, tag
GET	/api/v1/documents/{id}
POST	/api/v1/documents
PATCH	/api/v1/documents/{id}
DELETE	/api/v1/documents/{id} — a folder takes its subtree
GET	/api/v1/documents/{id}/revisions, /revisions/{rev_id}
GET	/api/v1/documents/{id}/backlinks — the documents linking here
POST	/api/v1/documents/{id}/revisions/{rev_id}/restore
POST	/api/v1/documents/{id}/regenerate — erase the body and scaffold it again
GET	/api/v1/documents/search?q=&limit=
GET	/api/v1/documents/blocks?block=&device_id=
GET	/api/v1/documents/coverage
POST	/api/v1/documents/scaffold

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Standalone mode

Documents are full-mode only. Standalone has no backend to store or search them, and the same reasoning as ADR-001 applies: the section is hidden in the sidebar and explains itself if reached directly, rather than being polyfilled into localStorage with no search and no history.

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Not built yet

Export/import of the tree as .md files, a print/handbook view, an aggregated open-tasks view, image upload inside a document (would reuse api/routes/media.py, full-mode only), documents in the canvas-wide search modal, [[ autocompletion in the editor, and the MCP tools — those are the planned second lot.