Catalogues and licences

No catalogue is bundled

The library imports no publisher's catalogue and ships none: no card list, no format and no taboo list of a published game, and no importer of one. The cards of a game, their names and texts, and the lists of a game's formats are data their publisher owns; copying them needs the publisher's licence, and a catalog published without a licence grants none.

The examples, the tests and the fuzz corpora of the library use invented cards and formats only.

How an application provides its catalog

An application provides its cards and formats through two ports:

• Contract\CardCatalog::find($id) gives a Card — its identifier, its name and, when it differs from the format's, its copies — or null;
• Contract\FormatCatalog::find($code) gives a Format, with its taboo lists, or null.

The data behind them is the application's to hold:

• cards it wrote itself, for its own game or a game of its members;
• invented cards, for examples, tutorials and tests;
• cards under a licence it holds that allows this use — a licence it checked, for the cards and the texts it shows.

A Format is read from the application's configuration or files with Format::fromArray() or fromJson(); the cards come from its own database or files. The library needs only identifiers, names and numbers of copies: a card's text, art and rules stay with the application, which shows what its licence allows.