*.PIA structure

[thadk]

anypiab is a command line program like the anypia32 GUI program.

Loading a *.pia file outputs something like
"123-45-0020 06/22/1952 1235.80 2090.10 931.00 62 and 1 month 5 T" but it also appears that it outputs to a file (thanks @AlexMerritt)

One issue we will face is getting the earnings, and other data, into anypia-js

The current interface is using this .pia file format.
http://thadk.net/anypiamac-docs/html/General/structure.html

The alternative is to support the XML format somehow with the oactobjs libraries directly and plug the javascript straight into its state format and skip the .pia format.

[thadk]

anypiab output on the same pia files corresponds to AnyPIA32 like this on sample25.pia
per this documentation: https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/anypia/anypiab.html

Make sure to pay attention to the SSA data version you are using.

And anypiab.js:

[thadk]

For the API we may be able to take inspiration from this javascript API wrapper for gdal-js: https://github.com/azavea/loam/blob/develop/src/worker.js and related files, demo here.

gdal is the mega-geospatial library which backs PostGIS: https://github.com/ddohler/gdal-js

[mrpippy]

Do you know what "level" you want the JS API to expose? Like have WorkerData or PiaData objects exposed at the JS level, or just have those objects called from a C++ function and then expose that single function to JS?

The first way is more flexible, but could be tricky to implement. It looks like a lot of functions throw C++ exceptions, and those probably need to be wrapped to catch the exceptions. Dealing with the old-school C++ memory management used here from JS also might be a chore.
The second way is more limiting, but would be quicker to get started with.

[thadk]

I tried to lay out my thinking in #7 at this same moment. Thanks for this C++ wisdom though: I don't really want to introduce complicated bugs by interfacing with the existing code in untested ways. It seems like your first idea is like my (2.) and your second idea is most like my (3.)?

I'll talk to Alex for more insight too.