Purpose of manifests

Manifests connect suites to configuration sets, or they define configuration values. They let you define

Manifests are optional. A configuration module (schema) can opt out of using them. Such a module then only uses module default values, and the default set (if any and if the it allows multiple sets) or the only one set (if it doesn’t allow multiple sets).

There are two types of manifests: containing values or associations. They both apply to any suites under their folder tree. See SettingsScope.

Manifests are plain text files, so you can share and manage them through source control. Empty lines are skipped, and so are lines starting with a hash # (which serve for comments).

Values manifests

These are in files called in SeLiteSettingsValues.txt . They define configuration values (in addition to profile-based configurations sets managed through SettingsInterface). Values are entered in simple format, one per line:

moduleName.fieldName value
moduleName.fixedMapFieldName:key value

moduleName is the name of your custom configuration module (for common frameworks it’s usually extensions.selite-settings.common). Module names, field names and FixedMap keys can’t contain any whitespace, so this syntax is non-ambiguous. Values can contain any characters (except for line breaks).

If a field allows multiple values, you can list them on per line; they will be loaded in that order. However, they have to be listed in the same manifest file (see SettingsScope > Multi-valued fields) - they won’t merge from different scopes.

Literals for special values

For single-valued fields you can use literal SELITE_NULL to represent Javascript’s null. For multi-valued fields there you can use literal SELITE_VALUE_PRESENT to represent an empty list/choice.

For File fields, you can start their value(s) with literal SELITE_THIS_MANIFEST_FOLDER. That gets replaced with the full path to the manifest’s folder. Also, such values (relative to the manifest’s folder) can contain a folder separator (\ or / - either will work on any system).

Associations manifests

These are in files called SeLiteSettingsAssociations.txt. They connect scripts and profile-based configuration sets. Associations are entered in simple format, one per line. Module names and set names can’t contain a space, so this syntax is non-ambiguous:

moduleName setName

A configuration set can be linked to any number of folders. A folder can have maximum of one set associated with it per module at its own level. However, it also inherits any associations from higher folder(s) - see SettingsScope.