How do I format CouchDB design documents in a human readable way?

Question

Since views are defined with JSON in CouchDB I'm having a hard time defining those in a human readable fashion.

Take this document:

{
    "language": "javascript", 
    "views": {
        "by_location": {
            "map": "function(doc) { if (doc.location != null) emit(doc.location, doc) }" 
        }, 
        "by_location_tags": {
            "map": "function(doc) { if (doc.top_tags) { for(i=0;i<doc.top_tags.length;i++) { emit([doc.top_tags[i].tag_name, doc.location], doc); } } }"
        }
    }
}

Writing the map function as one long string is plain ugly and it's insanely hard to spot bugs. I wonder what is the workflow for defining views in CouchDB? I feel as I'm missing the obvious.

Answer 1

In addition to mentioned Futon, there are several tools that allow you to write your map and view functions with your favorite editors and save them on your local file system. Those tools than take care of "pushing" your code to CouchDB.

You can find more about those tools here