Documenting your Project#

Flowman supports to automatically generate a documentation of your project. The documentation can either include all major entities like mappings, relations and targets. Or you may want to focus only on some aspects like the relations which is useful for providing a documentation of the data model.

Flowman Documentation

Providing Descriptions#

Although Flowman will generate many valuable documentation bits by inspecting the project, the most important entities (relations, mappings and targets) also provide the ability to manually and explicitly add documentation to them. This documentation will override any automatically inferred information.

Generating Documentation via Command Line#

Generating the documentation is as easy as running flowexec as follows:

flowexec -f my_project_directory documentation generate

Since generating documentation also requires a job context (which may contain additional parameters and environment variables), you can also explicitly specify the job which is used for instantiating all entities like relations, mappings and targets as follows:

flowexec -f my_project_directory documentation generate <job_name> <param_1=value> <param_2=value>

If no job is specified, Flowman will use the main job

Generating Documentation via Build Target#

The section above describes how to explicitly generate the project documentation by invoking flowexec documentation generate. As an alternative, Flowman offers a document targets, which allows one to generate the documentation during the VERIFY phase (after the BUILD phase has finished) of a normal Flowman project.

This can be easily configured as follows

targets:
  # This target will create a documentation in the VERIFY phase
  doc:
    kind: documentation
    # We do not specify any additional configuration, so the project's documentation.yml file will be used

Then you only need to add that build target doc to your job as follows:

jobs:
  main:
    targets:
      # List all targets which should be built as part of the `main` job
      - measurements
      - ...
      # Finally add the "doc" job for generating the documentation 
      - doc