Note: This is unannounced, unstable, pre-release software. Repository is public only to enable collaboration and testing by the project developers. Please do not publicize or link to this repository yet. Thank You!

Tad is a desktop application for viewing and analyzing tabular data such as CSV files.

Launch tad from the command line like this:

$ tad movie_metadata.csv

This will open a new window with a scrollable view of the file contents:

Tad's main grid component is actually a full featured pivot table; a few additional mouse clicks from the above view yields this:

To build Tad, you should have node and npm(https://www.npmjs.com/get-npm) (included when you install Node.js) installed. The versions of these tools used for development are:

$ node --version
v7.1.0
$ npm --version
3.10.9

$ git clone [email protected]:antonycourtney/tad.git
$ cd tad

$ npm install

( Note: Because Tad uses a fork of node-sqlite3 accessed via a git:// URL, you must use npm rather than yarn to install dependencies. Sorry.)

This will install dependencies from package.json from npm(https://www.npmjs.com/). This will take some time, particularly if this is the first time you are downloading many of the dependencies.

This step will install various static assets (such as the Bootstrap CSS file) into a common build directory used by the application:

$ npm run build-assets

Open a new terminal window in the same directory, and run

$ npm run webpack:watch

This will use webpack and Babel to compile and bundle the ES2015 sources into older versions of JavaScript supported by node.js and Chromium.

Tad depends on the sqlite npm package, which in turn depends on the SQLite library, implemented in C++. For reasons I don't fully understand related to how native libraries are loaded by node.js and Electron, it's necessary to recompile this code from source every time a new package is installed in our application.

To perform this step, run:

$ npm run electron-rebuild

This will take considerable time (around 70 seconds on my Late 2013 MacBook Pro).

Note: Every time a new dependency is added to the application (using npm install --save), it is necessary to redo this step.

Finally, to start the application, run:

$ npm start csv/bart-comp-all.csv

This should start the application and open a window displaying the contents of the specified CSV file.

Use the -- form to pass additional dashed arguments to the application (instead of npm). For example:

$ npm start -- --show-queries csv/bart-comp-all.csv

if you want to see the generated SQL queries.

Before building the DMG file, we must first use webpack and Babel to generate the compiled, minified JavaScript bundle. To ensure a clean build and that we generate an optimized, production build, do the following:

$ npm run clean
$ npm run build-prod

I'm using electron-builder for packaging, which uses electron-packager for creating the App.

Note that, due to an alleged bug in Yarn's handling of sub-processes, one must use npm (not Yarn!) to run this build step. To build a packaged DMG for distribution, run:

$ npm run dist

This should create a full application in ./dist/mac, and a packaged DMG for distribution in ./dist/Tad-X.Y.Z.dmg.

Tad is an Electron application written in ES2015 using flow type annotations. Tad's front end User Interface is implemented in React, using SlickGrid for the main grid component. In the main process, Tad uses SQLite for internal storage and efficient queries on tabular data. (TODO: architecture diagram)