Developer Guide¶

Welcome to the OPAL developer documentation. This guide provides technical details for developers who want to extend OPAL, create custom parsers, or integrate it into larger systems.

In This Section¶

Architecture Overview ¶

Understand OPAL's system design, component interactions, and data flow.

Development Workflows ¶

Best practices for OPAL development, testing, and deployment.

Creating Custom Parsers ¶

Step-by-step guide to building new parsers for additional data sources.

Creating Court Parsers ¶

Specialized guide for creating parsers specifically for court websites.

Error Handling ¶

Implement robust error handling and recovery in your parsers.

Class Reference ¶

Detailed documentation of OPAL's core classes and their methods.

Configurable Court Extractor Design ¶

Deep dive into the flexible extraction system architecture.

User Agent Headers Guide ¶

Best practices for managing user agents and avoiding blocks.

Quick Start for Developers¶

Setting Up Development Environment¶

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/your-org/opal.git
cd opal

# Create virtual environment
python -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate  # On Windows: venv\Scripts\activate

# Install in development mode
pip install -e .
pip install -r requirements-dev.txt

Creating Your First Parser¶

from opal.base_parser import BaseParser

class MyCustomParser(BaseParser):
    def __init__(self):
        super().__init__()
        self.source_name = "My Source"
        self.base_url = "https://example.com"

    def parse(self, start_date=None, end_date=None):
        # Implementation here
        pass

Core Concepts¶

Parser Architecture¶

BaseParser: Abstract base class for all parsers
Extractor Classes: Modular components for specific extraction tasks
Data Models: Standardized output formats
URL Pagination: Handling multi-page results

Key Design Patterns¶

Factory Pattern: Parser instantiation
Strategy Pattern: Extraction strategies
Observer Pattern: Progress monitoring
Decorator Pattern: Feature enhancement

Development Standards¶

Code Style¶

Follow PEP 8 guidelines
Use type hints for all public methods
Document all classes and methods
Write comprehensive tests

Testing Requirements¶

Unit tests for all parsers
Integration tests for end-to-end flows
Mocking for external dependencies
Minimum 80% code coverage

Advanced Topics¶

Performance Optimization¶

Concurrent request handling
Response caching strategies
Memory-efficient parsing
Rate limiting implementation

Security Considerations¶

Input validation
Safe HTML parsing
Request header management
Error message sanitization

Contributing¶

Before contributing, please: 1. Read our Contributing Guide 2. Set up your development environment 3. Run the test suite 4. Follow our code review process