Markdown is a wiki syntax that has been highly adopted by the community. One might be tempted to write his specifications (and commit along with the code) in Markdown.

We took advantage of this need to implement a functionality in GreenPepper that is called Dialect Management. 

A dialect is a way for GreenPepper to "understand" a specification syntax. Click here for more information on Dialects. 

MarkdownDialect is the first Dialect that Greenpepper ships.

Support for Markdown syntax

Using the --dialect option in greenpepper, you can define a class that will be used to convert a specification from a syntax to HTML.

That is what is used for greenpepper to support Markdown.

Example usage

To use the default Markdown dialect, you will need to include greenpepper-extensions-java in your classpath. Then you need to use the class com.greenpepper.runner.dialect.MarkdownDialect.

java -cp greenpepper-core.jar:greenpepper-extensions-java.jar com.greenpepper.runner.Main \
         -d com.greenpepper.runner.dialect.MarkdownDialect \
         specification.md \
         output.html

Differences between the GreenPepper Markdown syntax and CommonMark

CommonMark is a specification defining a strict markdown syntax. Even though the initiative is needed, the specification becomes hightly restrictive for usage in software.

Greenpepper extends this specification for handling html tables in a more flexible way.

Allowed differences between column numbers

Greenpepper allows the following :

| do with | Banker |
|---------|--------|
| accept | open an account for | John |
| display | the id of | John | account |
| check  | the balance of | John | account is | 0 |

Multiple lines headers

Greenpepper allows the following :

| list of | Accounts |
| owner | balance | id  |
|-------|---------|-----|
| John  | 0       | abc |