Building the docs locally

sphinx-build -a docs/source build

or

cd docs
make html

And to view the docs open build/html/index.html.

Adding a Community Tool

To contribute a new tool to the list of analysis, visualization and data management tools, please create a pull request to this repo. Adding a tool requires the following steps.

Step 1: Create a new folder for your tool in docs/source/tools/<mytool> with the name of your tool

Step 2: Create a new file docs/source/tools/<mytool>/<mytool>.rst for your tool and copy the following template to that file

.. _analysistools-<mytool>:

<mytoolname>
------------

.. short_description_start

:ref:`analysistools-<mytool>` <briefly describe your tool> :bdg-link-primary:`Docs <mydocs>` :bdg-link-primary:`Source <mysoure>`.

.. short_description_end

.. image:: <myimgage>
    :class: align-left
    :width: 400

Step 3: Update the <my*> parts and add a brief description of your tool as well as an image for your tool.

Step 4: You may add additional sections as appropriate to the page, e.g., to describe tool features, usage, or installation. In particular, also consider adding a section on Compatability with NWB to describe how your tools integrate with NWB (e.g., does your tool support read/write/update of specific neurodata_types in NWB and does your tool require any extensions).

Step 5: Add your tool to the tools index page. For analysis and visualization, edit docs/source/tools/analysis_tools_home.rst and for data acquistion and control tools edit docs/source/tools/acquisition_tools_home.rst

Step 5.1: Add your tool to the toctree at the top of the page tools index page to ensure the tool gets listed in the main menu

Step 5.2: In the section that best fits your tool on the tools index page add the following and again update the <my*> marked parts.

.. image:: <mytool>/<myimage>
    :class: align-left
    :width: 180

.. include::  <mytool>/<mytool.rst>
        :start-after: .. short_description_start
        :end-before: .. short_description_end

With .. include directive with the start-after and end-before parameters, Sphinx will automatically include the short description from your doc so the glossary will automatically be updated as you make changes in the main document of your your tool.

Note

Depending on how long your and the previous tool description are, you may need to add some empty lines in HTML before/after your entry to ensure the overview displays correctly. You can add lines in HTML by adding the following in the file

.. raw:: html

    <br />
    <br />

Note

Latex does not support gif images. If you need to use gif images then you should place them in a .. only:: html directive and provide a corresponding .. only:: latex directive with the appropriate content for Latex PDF builds.

Step 6a: Build the docs and and review your changes via

cd docs
make html
open build/html/index.html

Step 7 Create a pull request to this repo with your changes

Adding a Community Project

To contribute a new project to the community gallery, please create a pull request to this repo. Adding a tool requires the following steps.

Step 1: Create a new entry on the docs/source/community_gallery/community_gallery.rst page. An entry should consist of a small figure or icon and brief description, following the style of the existing entries.

• Figure should be added to the folder docs/source/community_gallery/figures
• If you design the figure in PowerPoint then please add the source slide to the docs/source/community_gallery/figures/figure_icons_source.pptx file
• External links are typically defined as roles in the docs/source/conf_extlinks.py

Step 2: Build the docs and and review your changes via

cd docs
make html
open build/html/index.html

Step 3 Create a pull request to this repo with your changes

External links

Adding new external links

For managing links to external resources we use the extlinks of sphinx. The mapping of links is defined in the /docs/source/conf_extlinks.py as part of extlinks dictionary. To update or add a new link edit the extlinks dictionary. For example, extlinks includes the entry

The key in the dict defines the alias name as a new role so that we can write :pynwb_issue: to create a link. The value is the dict are a tuple consisting of the URL and the caption.

• URL The URL may contain %s once to extend the URL, e.g, in the case of linking to issues we need to add the issue number.

• Caption:

  • None : The the link caption rendered in the docs is the full URL
  • '' : The link caption in the text is the custom text indicated in the role
  • text%s : If the caption is a string, then it must contain %s exactly once. In this case the link caption is caption with the partial URL substituted for %s. E.g., in the above example, the link caption for pynwb issues would be issue pynwb#1.

Creating external links in the docs

The extlinks dict in /docs/source/conf_extlinks.py defines a set of new roles. This allows us to refer, e.g., to specific usses in PyNWB via :pynwb_issue:`1` which will in turn will be rendered as the text "pynwb#1" in the docs with the appropriate link to the issue. Similarly, if we want to refer to the INCF training we can write :incf_collection:`INCF Training` in the text. Since the caption is an empty string in the extlinks dict for the incf_collection key, the link will be rendered using the provided text, i.e., here "INCF Training" with the approbriate link.

Normally the extlinks extension will add the part we link to the URL. To use the exact URL as defined in extlinks dict use the following syntax :pynwb-docs:`PyNWB <>`, which will render the text (here PyNWB) with a hyperlink to the exact, unmodified URL.

Linking to external packages

Adding links to external packages

To link to specific entities (e.g., classes) in documentation of external software packages, we use the intersphinx feature. The mapping to external docs is defined in /docs/source/conf_extlinks.py as part of the intersphinx_mapping dictionary. To support linking to a new tool, add the tool to the mapping.

Creating external links to external packages in the docs

Once the mapping is defined, we can refer to specific types much like we would refer to classes in our own tools. For example, the intersphinx mapping includes mappings for PynNWB and Pandas:

intersphinx_mapping = {
    'pynwb': ('https://pynwb.readthedocs.io/en/stable/', None),
    'pandas': ('https://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/', None),
}

With this we can now easly link to elements in those packages. E.g., to links to the docs of pandas.DataFrame we would write :py:class:`~pandas.DataFrame` in the docs. Similarly, to link to NWBFile in PyNWB we would write :py:class:`~pynwb.file.NWBFile` in the docs. When including the ~ we tell Sphinx to ignore the package when rendering in the text, i.e., :py:class:`~pynwb.file.NWBFile` (with ~) will render as NWBFile in the docs, whereas :py:class:`pynwb.file.NWBFile` (without ~) will render as the full name pynwb.file.NWBFile.

NWB Software Analytics

Software analytics are being managed via the NWB Project Analytics. This page checks out and renders the nwb_project_analytics automatically as part of the sphinx build process. The code statistics are being updated nightly via GitHub Actions on the nwb_project_analytics repository and are cached in the data folder of that repo. The rst sources and figures are then being generated automatically during the sphinx build.