Is there a way to parse object-type params?

[geotre]

I had a look through the documentation and examples but couldn't see anything relevant. In my application I want to have a list of actions to be performed by one of the commands, where each action is represented as something like:

type Action = object
  name, cmd, args: string

And the proc passed to cligen's dispatch is something like:

proc runActions(a: seq[Action]) = discard

import cligen
dispatch(runActions)

In practice these will probably be written out into a config file and merged in using parsecfg.

Is this possible? Should I just have a separate config file and handle all this separately to cligen?

[c-blake]

I do mention it in the README, but test/InitOb.nim may also be helpful to get started. The essential logic of initFromCL is to generate an object initializer from any command-line like data (seq[string], basically). I'd bet you can adapt that to your purposes.

If you want a really worked out example you could look at how lc uses cligen. lc actually merges settings from config files, the command line and dynamically from per-listed-directory saved dot files called ".lc" (it has to scan a directory anyway - it just loads that if it notices it). This latter feature allows Unix to be sort of smart like Windows remembering the last "format" for folder contents..It's more manual but also more powerful. I was even careful to make it workable on file hierarchies where the lc-ing user has no write perms through a shadow hierarchy that they can write to. This also allows different users to have different preferences on a shared system. I'm not quite sure why lc is not more popular. Probably just my not really marketing it as successfully as the RESF markets the not-as-capable IMO exa.

[c-blake]

Also, if it is ok to be a single command line argument but maybe with commas (,), colons (:), or something, then you can define your own whole new on-the-CLI syntax with an (in-scope of dispatch) definition of proc argParse(dst: var Action, dfl: Action, a: var ArgcvtParams): bool and proc argHelp(dfl: Action, a: var ArgcvtParams): seq[string]. That is under the Custom Parameter Types part of the README. You may need to "rotate" your conceptualization slightly, but between these two things, I suspect cligen can already do very close to what you want.