Contexts¶

Contexts are dictionaries (dicts) that contain the entries of the header for a disseminate document, the body of the disseminate document (‘body’ entry) and other default settings. The context is used directly in rendering documents.

The context has the following responsibilities:

Variable storage. The context is a dict that contains the values needed to properly render a target document.
Data validation. Specific entries, like the src_filepath, must be a specific type, like a SourcePath. When initializing and resetting a context, the context will check that entries match this type, and it will convert to the valid type if it can.
Inheritance. A document and its sub-documents will each have their own context. It is useful to have the context of sub-documents inherit from the parent document’s context (parent context) for some values. A context keeps a reference to the parent context, and when resetting the context, some (or all) of the parent context values are either copied over or referenced.
Intelligent resetting. A context intelligently resets to its initial values and the values of the parent_context on reset. These values can then be overwritten when the document source is read in.

Context