The heart of TiddlyWiki can be seen as an extensible representation transformation engine. Given the text of a tiddler and its associated MIME type, the engine can produce a rendering of the tiddler in a new MIME type. Furthermore, it can efficiently selectively update the rendering to track any changes in the tiddler or its dependents.
The most important transformations are from `text/x-tiddlywiki` wikitext into `text/html` or `text/plain` but the engine is used throughout the system for other transformations, such as converting images for display in HTML, sanitising fragments of JavaScript, and processing CSS.
The key feature of wikitext is the ability to include one tiddler within another (usually referred to as //transclusion//). For example, one could have a tiddler called //Disclaimer// that contains the boilerplate of a legal disclaimer, and then include it within lots of different tiddlers with the macro call `<<tiddler Disclaimer>>`. This simple feature brings great power in terms of encapsulating and reusing content, and evolving a clean, usable implementation architecture to support it efficiently is a key objective of the TiddlyWiki5 design.
It turns out that the transclusion capability combined with the selective refreshing mechanism provides a good foundation for building TiddlyWiki's user interface itself. Consider, for example, the StoryMacro in its simplest form:
{{{
<<story story:MyStoryTiddler>>
}}}
The story macro looks for a list of tiddler titles in the tiddler `MyStoryTiddler`, and displays them in sequence. The subtle part is that subsequently, if `MyStoryTiddler` changes, the `<<story>>` macro is selectively re-rendered. So, to navigate to a new tiddler, code merely needs to add the name of the tiddler and a line break to the top of `MyStoryTiddler`:
{{{
var storyTiddler = store.getTiddler("MyStoryTiddler");
The mechanisms that allow all of this to work are fairly intricate. The sections below progressively build the key architectural concepts of TiddlyWiki5 in a way that should provide a good basis for exploring the code directly.
!! Tiddlers
Tiddlers are an immutable dictionary of name:value pairs called fields.
The only field that is required is the {{{title}}} field, but useful tiddlers also have a {{{text}}} field, and some or all of the standard fields {{{modified}}}, {{{modifier}}}, {{{created}}}, {{{creator}}}, {{{tags}}} and {{{type}}}.
Hardcoded in the system is the knowledge that the `tags` field is a string array, and that the `modified` and `created` fields are JavaScript `Date` objects. All other fields are strings.
The WikiStore also manages the plugin modules used for macros, and operations like serializing, deserializing, parsing and rendering tiddlers.
Each WikiStore is connected to another shadow store that is used to provide default content. Under usual circumstances, when an attempt is made to retrieve a tiddler that doesn't exist in the store, the search continues into its shadow store (and so on, if the shadow store itself has a shadow store).
Clients can register event handlers with the WikiStore object. Event handlers can be registered to be triggered for modifications to any tiddler in the store, or with a filter to only be invoked when a particular tiddler or set of tiddlers changes.
Whenever a change is made to a tiddler, the wikistore registers a `nexttick` handler (if it hasn't already done so). The `nexttick` handler looks back at all the tiddler changes, and dispatches any matching event handlers.
The `tiddlers` field is a hashmap of the title of each tiddler that is linked or included in the current one. The value is `true` if the tiddler is a //'fat'// dependency (ie the text is included in some way) or `false` if the tiddler is a //`skinny`// dependency.
The `dependentAll` field is used to indicate that the tiddler contains a macro that scans the entire pool of tiddlers (for example the `<<list>>` macro), and is potentially dependent on any of them. The effect is that the tiddler should be rerendered whenever any other tiddler changes.
!! Rendering
The `parseTree.compile(type)` method returns a renderer object that contains a JavaScript function that generates the new representation of the original parsed text.
The `tiddler` parameter to the `render` method identifies the tiddler that is acting as the context for this rendering -- for example, it provides the fields displayed by the `<<view>>` macro. The `store` parameter is used to resolve any references to other tiddlers.
!! Rerendering
When rendering to the HTML/SVG DOM in the browser, TiddlyWiki5 also allows a previous rendering to be selectively updated in response to changes in dependent tiddlers. At the moment, only the WikiTextRenderer supports rerendering.
The rerender method on the renderer is called as follows:
|node |A reference to the DOM node containing the rendering to be rerendered |
|changes |A hashmap of `{title: "created|modified|deleted"}` indicating which tiddlers have changed since the original rendering |
|tiddler |The tiddler providing the rendering context |
|store |The store to use for resolving references to other tiddlers |
|renderStep |See below |
Currently, the only macro that supports rerendering is the `<<story>>` macro; all other macros are rerendered by calling the ordinary `render()` method again. The reason that the `<<story>>` macro goes to the trouble of having a `rerender()` method is so that it can be carefully selective about not disturbing tiddlers in the DOM that aren't affected by the change. If there were, for instance, a video playing in one of the open tiddlers it would be reset to the beginning if the tiddler were rerendered.
