DHIS 2 Documentation

All of your favourite documentation - in markdown format!

Updating the documents

This is the easy bit, and is all that most people have to do. The following sections describe the format, structure and a few considerations necessary for correctly generating the desired output.

Format and editing

The documents are maintained in commonmark markdown format, with an .md extension.

Editing documents is as simple as editing a text file. Many IDEs have markdown support, including live previews. For Linux and Windows, ghostwriter is a nice option; it is free and supports side-by-side preview and custom stylesheets.

Structure

The structure of the documentation site is defined in the build repository dhis2-docs-builder.

Tip

The best way to find the source of the document you wish to edit is to find the document on the docs.dhis2.org website and click the "Edit" icon at the top of the page.

Adding images

Image resources should be included as relative paths inside a sub-folder relative to the current document. e.g. for the chapter content/android/android-event-capture-app.md, the images are somewhere under content/android/resources/images/<rest-of-path> and are referenced like [](resources/images/<rest-of-path>)

Styling images

If you want to control the alignment and size of images, you can take advantage of a markdown extensionthat we use. It allows you to set attributes such as width, height and class in curly brackets at the end of the image definition. For example:

![](resources/images/maintainence/predictor_sequential.png){ width=50% }

will make your image 50% of the page width (it is best to use percentages to support a variety of output forms), while

![](resources/images/maintainence/predictor_sequential.png){ .center width=50% }

will also centre the image on the page (due to the definition of the .center class in css).

When images are written like

![Approving and accepting](resources/images/data_approval/approval_level_steps.png)

i.e. with caption text in the square brackets, they are rendered as figures with captions. These are centred by default, with a centred, italicised caption.

Taking screenshots

For screenshots of the DHIS 2 web interface, we recommend using Chrome browser, with the following two extensions:

1. Window Resizer. Use this to set the resolution to 1440x900
2. Fireshot. Use this to quickly create a snapshot of the visible part

Fireshot can even capture the full page, i.e. scrolled, if desired. It can also capture just a selected area (but the maximum width should always be 1440px)

When taking screenshots of the Android app, size should be set to 360x640.

Section references

In order to provide fixed references (anchors) within the documentation, we can set a fixed text string to be applied to any section. For our markdown processor this is done by adding a hash id in curly brackets at the end of the line with the section title, e.g.

## Validation { #webapi_validation }

To generate a data validation summary you can interact ...

Will set the section id of the level 2 heading Validation to "webapi_validation", which may then be referenced as "#webapi_validation" from any html file.

Note

In order to support linking by anchor reference from other documents, please try to keep the section ids unique. For example, if "#webapi_validation" is unique across the documentation, then you can refer to it from any other part of the documentation simply with [link name](#webapi_validation).
If the section id being referenced is not unique, the document processor will attempt to resolve to the "closest" anchor with that name. When the linking file belongs to a specific version, the processor will ignore anchors belonging to different versions.

Caution

Our documentation is compiled into both pages and full documents. For this reason it is not advised to include paths in inter-document references. Please use unique section ids as described above in order for the links to resolve correctly in both document types.

(Please follow the convention of lowercase letters and underscores, in order to create id's that are also valid as filenames in cases where we split files as part of the document generation).

Tables

As an extension to pure commonmark, we also support GFM tables (defined with pipes |), such as:

| Table Type | Description |
|:--|:----|
|Commonmark (HTML)| Tables described in pure HTML |
|Github Flavour Markdown (GFM)| Tables described with pipes: easier to read/edit, but limited in complexity|

which produces output like:

Table Type	Description
Commonmark (HTML)	Tables described in pure HTML
Github Flavour Markdown (GFM)	Tables described with pipes: easier to read/edit, but limited in complexity

For simple tables these are much more convenient for working with. They are limited to single lines of text (i.e. each row must be on a single line), but you can, for example use <br> tags to create line breaks and effectively split up paragraphs within cells, if necessary.

Important

Please try to use GFM tables as they give much better support for translations.
You can also continue to use HTML tables when you really need more complexity (but you can also consider whether there is a better way of presenting the data).

Tip

If you want to apply a caption to your markdown tables, add a preceding block starting with "Table: " followed by the caption title.
e.g. the following results in the caption "Data store structure"

Table: Data store structure

| Item | Description | Data type |
|---|---|---|
| Namespace | Namespace for organization of entries. | String |
| Key | Key for identification of values. | String |
| Value | Value holding the information for the entry. | JSON |
| Encrypted | Indicates whether the value of the given key should be encrypted | Boolean | 

(Note: in GitHub you will just see the "Table: ..." block as text, but it will be rendered as a caption in the docs site)

INCLUDES

!INCLUDE directives can be used to include the contents of another markdown file into the current one.

!INCLUDE "../other_directory/other_file.md"

Use relative links for !INCLUDE directives.

NOTE

the !INCLUDE directives are not part of pure commonmark format, but are used in pre-processing to build the master documents.

"DHIS2" or "DHIS 2", that is the question

Historically, the correct form is "DHIS 2" when referring to the software system in normal written text. For convenience, some variables, paths, etc. use the compact form, and they should, of course, be respected in the documentation. Note that we are now moving towards applying the compact form "DHIS2" consistently across documentation.

Building the documents

See the build repository dhis2-docs-builder for information about biulding the documents