Running generators

You can generate various content from pyFlies experiment specifications. pyFlies is built using textX tool for DSL development in Python so you can query what generators are available using textx command line tools. To see all installed generators use textx list-generators command:

$ textx list-generators                   
any -> dot                    textX[2.3.0.dev0]             Generating dot visualizations from arbitrary models
textX -> dot                  textX[2.3.0.dev0]             Generating dot visualizations from textX grammars
textX -> PlantUML             textX[2.3.0.dev0]             Generating PlantUML visualizations from textX grammars
pyflies -> log                pyflies[0.4.0.dev0]           Generator for log/debug files.
pyflies -> csv                pyflies[0.4.0.dev0]           Generator for CSV files from pyFlies tables.
pyflies -> psychopy           pyflies-psychopy[0.1.0.dev0]  Generator for generating PsychoPy code from pyFlies descriptions

You will see all generators installed in your Python environment. First column is in language -> target format and you can see here that we have three pyFlies generators registered:

  • pyflies -> log -- produces log files from .pf files and is a builtin generator of the pyflies project. This generator is useful for debugging and overview of the course of your experiment.

  • pyflies -> csv -- produces CSV files from condition tables specified in .pf files and is also a builtin generator provided by the pyflies project. This generator is useful if you want a quick way to produce CSV condition files to be used in other experiment tools.

  • pyflies -> psychopy -- this generator produces PsychoPy Python code from .pf and is provided by pyflies-psychopy project

To call generator use textx generate command:

textx generate Posner.pf --target log --overwrite

Here we generate log output from Posner.pf pyflies experiment. We use --overwrite to overwrite existing log file.

textx generate Parity.pf --target psychopy --overwrite

This will generate PsychoPy Python code (Parity.py) from Parity.pf pyflies file.

textX uses pluggable architecture for languages and generators. Additional generators may be developed independently of the pyFlies project and registered in the environment by mere installation with pip.