Adds SoftDelete/Trash across characters, chapters, locations, beats with a
purge schedule and Trash page. Reworks the web client for keyboard-driven
navigation (focus helpers, help overlay, keyboard.md doc). Moves the
ChapterPage tag editor to the bottom of the page to match CharacterDetailPage.
Beats, tags, locations, open questions, and character/arc-stage
responses that reference a chapter now carry a ChapterLabel/DisplayNumber
alongside the raw Number, computed via the new
ChapterDisplayNumberLookup. Front/back matter chips show their title;
body chapters show "Chapter N: Title".
Chapters can now be marked FrontMatter/Body/BackMatter. Number stays
the manuscript sort key for every chapter; the author-facing display
number is now computed per-request as the chapter's ordinal among
Body chapters only, so a foreword or afterword no longer shifts the
numbering of the rest of the book. Surfaced through the API, agent
toolset, and import toolset.
Record create/update/delete events across novel content (chapters, beats,
characters, arc stages, tags, locations, questions) into an append-only
ActivityEvent log, aggregate by UTC day, and surface as a heatmap on the
novels list and each novel's dashboard. Backfills history from existing
CreatedAt timestamps on first boot after the migration.
Chapters now carry many Locations (new Tags-style entity with cross-referencing)
instead of a single free-text Setting field, with a Locations tab on the novel
for browsing them and seeing every chapter set at each one. Also surfaces the
distinct characters appearing in a chapter's beats, linked, under the beat/word
count on the outline tab.
Renames the domain concept from Project to Novel throughout the backend
(entities, DTOs, services, endpoints, ProjectAccessService/Permission,
ProjectId foreign keys), MCP server (tool names and routes), and the
React/Vite frontend (types, hooks, routes, components). Adds a new EF
Core migration (RenameProjectToNovel) using RenameTable/RenameColumn to
preserve existing data instead of dropping/recreating tables. Updates
CLAUDE.md's structure section to reference Novels/ instead of Projects/.
Introduces accounts (ASP.NET Identity + cookie auth), four global
roles (Admin/Writer/Editor/Reviewer), per-novel ownership and grants
via ProjectMember, and a service-API-key principal for the MCP server
and background import jobs. Enforcement lives in the application
services (not endpoint filters) so the embedded agent and MCP tools,
which call the same services directly, can't bypass it. Web client
gets a login page, session-aware routing, and a People section for
managing per-novel access.
Also includes prior in-flight changes from this branch (CLAUDE.md
compliance pass, dev-deploy docker-compose setup) that were
uncommitted when this feature work started.
Character assignment now lives on beats only, per batch-assign. Drops
Chapter.PovCharacterId (entity, contracts, service, agent/import/MCP
tools, web UI) and the backing column via migration.
Drop the Scene entity/grouping in favor of chapters carrying prose directly
and beats belonging to many characters. Add markdown editor + character
multi-select components to the web client. Remove all XML doc and inline
comments across the touched C#/TS/CSS files in favor of self-documenting
names, and record that convention in CLAUDE.md. Add .mcp.json (local MCP
server config, no secrets) and ignore .idea/.
Dashboard replaces the tabbed overview: Outline + Characters cards
(recent-first), gated by a new Project.Phase (Brainstorming ->
Outlining -> Writing -> Editing -> Complete). Brainstorming shows just
a notes editor; existing projects backfill to Outlining. Old brief
editor moves to a Settings route.
Beat table now renders as plain readable text, turning into editable
fields only for the clicked row. Fixed horizontal overflow on the
chapters list and beat table caused by unconstrained CSS grid/table
tracks sizing to their widest unwrapped child. Widened the project
layout's max width.
A missing record isn't exceptional — services now return null (logged
at Info) instead of throwing, and endpoints map null to 404. Agent and
import toolsets route not-found through their existing OrNotFound
result pattern rather than a caught exception.
Services now return entities; endpoints (and the agent toolsets) map to
*Response records instead of services building wire DTOs themselves.
Also brings in the outline-import agent, MCP tool, ledger and web dialog
that were already in progress on disk.
Not-found lookups return null/false instead of throwing NotFoundException
across all services — a missing row is expected control flow, not an
exceptional condition. NotFoundException stays for embedded precondition
checks inside mutations (missing parent, invalid foreign reference).
Guard (copied from mic-check) enforces required arguments at the top of
every service method. A ported IModelValidator<T> framework validates
every request DTO at the API layer via a new ValidationEndpointFilter,
returning a 400 with field-level messages; services re-run the same
validator and throw for direct callers that bypass the API.
Endpoints translate null/false into 404 via a new ToApiResult() helper.
The agent toolset boundary translates the same nullable/bool results
into the tool-error text the model already expected.
Information at endpoint and service-method boundaries, Debug in deeper
helpers, Warning before expected/recoverable failures (not-found,
validation, agent tool errors), Error on caught exceptions. Serilog
wraps the exception handler so request-completion logs report the
resolved status code rather than the raw exception. Never logs prose
bodies or the Anthropic API key.
The layered split into Domain/Application/Infrastructure/Api was forcing
organisation by layer: adding one capability meant touching four projects and
four folders that each held a slice of it. Those four projects are now one
feature-organised Novelly.Api, where each folder — Projects, Characters,
Chapters, Beats, Scenes, Tags, Agent — holds its entity, DTOs, service and
endpoints together. Common/ holds what genuinely crosses features (the patch
semantics, the two exception types, DraftStatus) and Data/ holds the DbContext
and migrations.
Six .NET projects become five: the three layer projects are gone, and
Novelly.AppHost and Novelly.ServiceDefaults are new.
- Namespaces move from NovelSoftware.* to Novelly.*, including the entity type
names recorded in the EF model snapshots. The migration ids are untouched, so
an existing novel.db still migrates cleanly — verified against a fresh file.
- Aspire orchestration mirrors the mic-check setup: the AppHost starts the API
on :5080 and the Vite dev server on :5173, and the API picks up OpenTelemetry,
health checks and service discovery from ServiceDefaults. /health and /alive
now answer in development.
- A Husky pre-push hook runs scripts/ci/prepush.sh: build, test, then a web
build. The scripts are plain bash so CI can run the same steps.
- The MCP server's env var is now NOVELLY_API_URL.
Verified beyond the build: 44 tests pass, the web client builds, the API was
exercised over curl (project/chapter/beat/tag round trip, tag cross-reference,
503 on the agent without a key while conversation listing still returns 200),
the MCP server was driven over stdio JSON-RPC (26 tools, errors still surface
the API's own message rather than being flattened), and the AppHost was run to
confirm both resources come up and Vite proxies /api through to the API.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01S56bfZMGe1hnhpWP4CjjNw
James Wampler