This is a concept for the management of the skill repository aka The “SUSI Skill CMS“.

With SUSI we are building a personal assistant where the users are able to write and edit skills in the easiest way that we can think of. To do that we have to develop a very simple skill language and a very simple skill editor

The skill editor should be done as a ‘wiki’-like content management system (cms). To create the wiki, we follow an API-centric approach. The SUSI server acts as an API server with a web front-end which acts as a client of the API and provides the user interface.

The skill editor will be ‘expert-centric’, an expert is a set of skills. That means if we edit one text file, that text file represents one expert, it may contain several skills which all belong together.

An ‘expert’ is stored within the following ontology:

model  >  group  >  language  >  expert  >  skill

To Implement the CMS wiki system we need versioning with a working AAA System. To implement versioning we used JGit. JGit is an EDL licensed, lightweight, pure Java library implementing the Git version control system.

So I included a Gradle dependency to add JGit to the SUSI Server project.

compile 'org.eclipse.jgit:org.eclipse.jgit:4.6.1.201703071140-r'

Now the task was to execute git commands when the authorised user makes changes in any of the expert. The possible changes in an expert can be

1. Creating an Expert
2. Modifying an existing Expert
3. Deleting an Expert

1. git add <filename>

2. git commit -m “commit message”

Real Example in SUSI Server

This is the code that every servlet shares. It defines the base user role set a URL endpoint to trigger the endpoint

public class ModifyExpertService extends AbstractAPIHandler implements APIHandler {
    @Override
    public String getAPIPath() {
        return "/cms/modifyExpert.json";
    }

This is the part where we do all the processing of the URL parameters and store their versions. This method takes the “Query call” and then extracts the “get” parameters from it.
For the functioning of this service, we need 5 things, “model”, “group”, “language”, “expert” and the “commit message”.

@Override
public ServiceResponse serviceImpl(Query call, HttpServletResponse response, Authorization rights, final JsonObjectWithDefault permissions) {

    String model_name = call.get("model", "general");
    File model = new File(DAO.model_watch_dir, model_name);
    String group_name = call.get("group", "knowledge");
    File group = new File(model, group_name);
    String language_name = call.get("language", "en");
    File language = new File(group, language_name);
    String expert_name = call.get("expert", null);
    File expert = new File(language, expert_name + ".txt");

Then we need to open your SUSI Skill DATA repository and commit the new file in it. Here we call the functions of JGit, which do the work of git add and git commit.

FileRepositoryBuilder builder = new FileRepositoryBuilder();
Repository repository = null;
try {

    repository = builder.setGitDir((DAO.susi_skill_repo))
            .readEnvironment() // scan environment GIT_* variables
            .findGitDir() // scan up the file system tree
            .build();

    try (Git git = new Git(repository)) {

The code above opens our local git repository and creates an object “git”. Then we perform further operations on “git” object. Now we add our changes to “git”. This is similar to when we run “git add . ”

    git.add()
                .addFilepattern(expert_name)
                .call();

Finally, we commit the changes. This is similar to “git commit -m “message”.

    git.commit()
                .setMessage(commit_message)
                .call();

At last, we return the success object and set the “accepted” value as “true”.

    json.put("accepted", true);
        return new ServiceResponse(json);
    } catch (GitAPIException e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
    }

Resources

JGit documentation : https://eclipse.org/jgit/documentation/

SUSI Server : https://github.com/fossasia/susi_server