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B.2 Elements of a TCM document

A document is stored as a number of sections  consisting of a number of fields. The order of fields  within a section is significant. The order of the sections in a diagram file is not significant except that the file should start with first the Storage section and then the Document section. The order of the sections of a table is significant as is explained in section B.5.

A section has a keyword indicating the kind of section and, when there is possibly more than one section of a certain keyword in the same file, it has an identifier which makes the section unique within the file. The rest of the section is enclosed by curly braces. Sections are separated by white space. white space is a sequence of one or more spaces, tabs, carriage-return or newline characters.

A field is an attribute-value pair enclosed by curly  braces. The order of the fields in a section is significant. Attribute values are one of the types listed in figure B.1. Fields within a section are separated by white space. The attribute name and the value within a field are also separated by white space. Section names and attribute names are case sensitive.

Although the files generated by TCM do not contain comment, comment text is accepted in a TCM file. Comments in a file start with a hash (#). The text in the same line after the hash is ignored.


  
Figure B.1: The value types of attributes stored in a file.
\begin{figure}
\begin{center}

\includegraphics {p/valuetypes.eps}\end{center}\end{figure}

When a file is read, TCM checks the syntax and checks the semantics, e.g. that all required fields are present, that the attribute values have the correct type and it checks references (such as that an edge section has fields referring to existing node sections). It reports errors that are found together with a line number in the file in the error message log dialog.


next up previous contents index
Next: B.3 Storage and Document Up: B TCM File format Previous: B.1 Introduction
Frank Dehne,Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
11/17/1997