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Customisation

SeqAn clearly documents which of its interfaces are designed to be used with user-provided types and how this can be realised.

# Generic interfaces

Templates are a core part of generic programming in C++, because they allow instantiating the code with different types or constants. SeqAn's API consists mostly of templates for exactly this reason, although we try to make this less visible by having the template parameters deduced in many scenarios.

We strive to document the exact requirements for every template parameter in the API documentation; often these are also enforced via C++ concepts. Wherever other types meet the given requirements, you can use these types as arguments – independent of whether they are standard library types, your own types or types from another library. See C++ Concepts for more details on this.

Some requirements are more elaborate and depend on a specialisation or "overload" of another entity from the SeqAn library. We call these "customisation points" (also known as "extension points").

# Customisation points

One such customisation point is seqan3::to_rank. Instead of the seqan3::semialphabet concept looking directly for member functions or free functions in your namespace, it always checks for a valid definition of seqan3::to_rank which in turn resolves to different possible implementations.

To customise one of our customisation points, follow the instructions in its API documentation. Typically, you have the choice between the following options:

1. Provide functionality as members.
2. Provide friends or free functions inside the namespace of your type (will be picked up via argument dependent lookup).
3. Specialise the respective template in seqan3::custom:: for that type and provide the needed functionality as static members of that specialisation (this is an "upload space" for specialisations).

The priority is bottom to top (i.e. solutions to 3. will be preferred over 1. and 2.), but we strongly recommend to use 1. and 2., because they are much easier to implement. Only use 3. if you adapt a third party's type and you cannot add to that type's definition and/or namespace.

Warning
  Never add anything (types, functions, variables...) to namespace seqan3 and never explicitly specialise one of our templates (except those in seqan3::custom) or overload one of our functions.

The HowTo on creating your own alphabet provides many examples of how to satisfy the requirements of customisation point objects.

More technical background on this topic can be found here:

1. Original blog article with background and the first "Niebloid" design.
2. A more recent article that also introduces the notion of "upload" namespaces.

There is also a proposed language extension to handle customisation points in a future version of C++.

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