Validating kana state files

Overview

This package is a wrapper for the kanaval C++ library for validating the HDF5 state files produced by bakana. It is primarily used for bakana's unit testing, to check that the parameters and results are correctly serialized. We created a separate package rather than attempting to bundle the Wasm files inside bakana (or scran.js) where they would bloat the production bundles.

Quick start

We assume that the *.kana file has been parsed to obtain the embedded HDF5 file, e.g., using bakana's parseKanaFile() function. Then, given a path to the state file, we can just do:

import * as va from "valkana";
await va.initialize();
va.validateState(
    path, /* path to a state file */
    true, /* embedded or linked */
    2001000 /* kana file version */
);

This will raise an error if the state file does not satisfy the specification.

Web applications will need to make sure that the HDF5 file is saved on valkana's virtual filesystem via the writeFile() function. See the reference documentation for more details.

Developer notes

This package compiles the kanaval library to WebAssembly for execution in typical Javascript environments (e.g., browser/Node.js). Building the Wasm binary requires the Emscripten toolchain and a recent version of CMake. Once these are installed, we can simply do:

./build.sh main
./build.sh browser

Testing can be done with npm run test on Node 16+.