Scott Addie

Think of a fork as a clone of someone else’s repository under your own account. Click the button outlined in red in the screenshot below to initiate the forking process.

Rather than explaining the rest of the process in its entirety, refer to GitHub’s amazingly thorough forking documentation here.

As a best practice, always create a feature branch from the master branch. This feature branch will be used to implement the schema changes. Let’s create a new feature branch, called “add_bootstraprc_schema”, within the forked repository:

git checkout -b add_bootstraprc_schema

Open the solution in Visual Studio 2015, and verify that the feature branch created above is the active branch:

Add a new JSON file to the json folder depicted in the screenshot below. This JSON file will become the schema. The completed schema file is shown here. I had never created a JSON schema prior to finding this project on GitHub, and I learned quickly that it’s not rocket science. This basic example will help immensely.

The master schema catalog is represented by a JSON file named catalog.json:

Add a new object literal to the file’s schemas array for the schema you’re adding. In the gist below, lines 11-16 were added. Line 14 is critical, as it determines the exact file name(s) to which the schema is applied within the IDE. If the fileMatch property isn’t present in the object literal, the user will be forced to manually associate a schema to the instance document (the JSON file opened in the editor window).

Create at least one test file. I decided to add three so that I could test different variations of the .bootstraprc file.

There are a couple of options for testing locally. Either build the solution as you would any other Visual Studio solution, or simply run the Grunt build task via Task Runner Explorer (View -> Other Windows -> Task Runner Explorer):

The output from running the Grunt task will appear within the Task Runner Explorer window. Note the “Done, without errors.” message near the bottom of the Task Runner Explorer output. All tests are passing. That’s our queue to continue to the next step.

Copy the bootstraprc.json file to %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\VisualStudio\$(VisualStudioVersion)\Schemas\JSON. With Visual Studio 2015, the $(VisualStudioVersion) property will be “14.0”.

Note the URL-encoded format of the file name in the screenshot above; this is an important detail. Now create a new ASP.NET app in Visual Studio, add a new .bootstraprc file, and test the schema which was created in this walk-through. By the way, the Add New File extension is really useful for adding files beginning with a period.

With the .bootstraprc file open in an editor window, you should see a drop-down with the name of the schema which was paired up with this JSON file. If the aforementioned Schema drop-down doesn’t appear, nudge the IDE by closing the editor window and reopening it.

This was your chance to test the constraints imposed by the schema. If the schema is working as expected, ship it!

With all of this leg work behind you, execute the following series of commands to push your changes to the fork:

git add .
git commit -m "Add schema for Webpack bootstrap-loader config file"
git push origin add_bootstraprc_schema

The actual pull request I ended up submitting can be found here. To read more about creating pull requests, review GitHub’s documentation here.