Exporter architecture

The exporter is the bridge between drawtonomy’s in-editor data and external formats — OpenDRIVE, OpenSCENARIO, Lanelet2, or whatever you plug in next. Understanding the pipeline is the prerequisite for adding a new target format.

The pipeline

Editor state ──► DrawtonomySnapshot ──► Exporter ──► File / blob
                  (serializable)        (pure)

1. `DrawtonomySnapshot`

A snapshot is a plain object: a list of shapes plus a version stamp and a timestamp. It is serialisable, has no DOM references, and is the only input the exporter takes.

interface DrawtonomySnapshot {
  version: string
  timestamp: string
  shapes: BaseShape[]
}

You build a snapshot with createSnapshot(shapes), or by parsing a saved drawtonomy.svg with parseDrawtonomySvg(svg).

2. The exporter modules

Each target format is a separate pure function:

exporter.exportToOpenDrive(snapshot, options) → string (XML)
exporter.exportToOpenScenario(snapshot, options) → string (XML)
exporter.exportToLanelet2(snapshot, options) → string (OSM XML)
exporter.buildEsminiZip(snapshot, options) → { blob, baseName }

They take a snapshot, return a string or a blob. No editor access, no DOM, no async dependencies. Same input, same output.

3. Round-trip

For Lanelet2, the SDK also ships a parser:

exporter.parseOsmXml(osm) → ParsedOsm
exporter.osmToShapes(parsed) → BaseShape[]

This is what powers the Lanelet2 import flow.

Why pure functions

The exporter runs the same code path in the browser, in a Node CI script, in a server-side pipeline, or in a browser extension. Tests run against snapshot fixtures with no headless browser.

That’s why the exporter lives in @drawtonomy/sdk and not inside the editor — the editor depends on the SDK, not the other way round.

Adding a target format

The exporter is the main extension point for new targets — CARLA, Unity, SUMO, custom DSLs. The recipe:

Add a new module under packages/drawtonomy-sdk/src/exporter/.
Take DrawtonomySnapshot in, return a string or blob.
Add tests under packages/drawtonomy-sdk/__tests__/exporter/ using snapshot fixtures.
Wire a UI entry point if you want the editor’s Export menu to know about it (optional — many users will call it programmatically).

The full developer guide is in the public repo: Exporter Developer Guide.