How DIMS fits together

                dims-network/dims          all the code, released as vX.Y.Z
                       │
        ┌──────────────┴──────────────┐
  vendor/ , pinned            dims-analysis, installed
  what the browser loads      what rebuilds the assets
  (bot PR; CI rebuilds it     (pip install -e ./dims —
   from the release tag)       not on PyPI yet)
        │                              │
   ┌────┴─────┬──────────────┐         └── used by every study, and by the builder
case-demo  case-ortho  case-karnatak
 (public)   (public)     (PRIVATE — data lives outside the repository)

Both halves move together and carry the same version number. A study's dims-case.json names it once: it is the tag CI fetches to verify vendor/, and it is the version of dims-analysis that produced the study's assets.

Why a monorepo

Because the alternative was tried and failed measurably. The code lived in five repositories that were supposed to stay in step by hand. They did not: three disjoint git lineages, four different copies of the frontend ranging from 2136 to 2500 lines, and no repository containing every feature. One fork carried the only correct wavelet coherence for months while the other four shipped a version that tracked signal power instead — because there was no mechanism for a fix to travel.

Propagation is now a version bump, not a merge.

Why no build step

A dashboard has to open from a plain file server, years later, on a machine nobody has maintained. Plain <script> tags and CSS custom properties survive that; a bundler and a node_modules tree do not. This constrains the design and is worth the constraint.

The constraint is not fully honoured yet: five libraries — React, ReactDOM, Plotly, PapaParse, lodash — are still loaded from a CDN rather than vendored, so a dashboard opened without a network is a blank page. That is dims#12, and until it is closed, "opens from a plain file server" means one with a network behind it.

Why everything self-registers

Adding a tab or an analysis must not require editing a file that already works. Before this, adding one analysis to the builder meant edits in four separate files, and adding a tab meant editing three regions of a 2000-line class — which is exactly how two forks came to have features that could never be shared.

Built-in tabs use the same registry as third-party ones, so the extension point cannot quietly rot: break it, and ELAN breaks with it.

The layers

The seam between producers and DIMS is a data contract, not an API: a CSV with a time column in seconds. That is why integrating an outside toolbox is a unit conversion rather than a merge.

Generated from docs/architecture.md at v1.0.1. Edit it there, not here.