Pipeline generation tooling has a content problem wearing an engineering costume. The geometry kernels are mature: alignments, hydraulic solvers, bend calculators and crossing detectors all behave. What misbehaves is everything downstream — the documents, datasheets, sequence sheets and handover packages that consume the model. Shapezo, the content-architecture discipline, treats that downstream layer as a first-class system with its own types, invariants and renderers. This post walks that architecture in plain prose, from entity model to asset pipeline, without a single line of code.
The entity model: five types carry a pipeline
Shapezo reduces pipeline generation content to five entity types, each with a strict responsibility.
The Route is the aggregate root: a named corridor with a design basis, a pressure class envelope and a list of segments. It owns nothing geometric directly; it owns the rules its segments must obey.
The Segment is the workhorse: a station range with a construction method, a terrain class and a consequence class. Segments are where change happens, because segments are where the ground changes. Every bend list, trench detail and drill plan hangs off a segment rather than off the route, which keeps diffs local when alignments move.
The Crossing is a first-class entity rather than an attribute: anything the line passes over, under or through, carrying the foreign asset's owner, the protection method, the achieved separation and the permit reference. Promoting crossings to entities is what allows regulatory renders to be generated at all, because a regulator's document is essentially a projection of the crossing set.
The Station is the fixed-point inventory: valve yards, pump and compressor sites, metering skids, launcher and receiver barrels. Stations anchor the narrative of operation the way segments anchor the narrative of construction.
The Spool is the fabrication unit: a shop-welded assembly with a weld map, a coating record and a shipping constraint. Spools matter to content architecture because they are the only entity whose consumer is a factory rather than a field, and factory consumers need different tolerances, different units of assembly and different revision rules.
Invariants: what the model refuses to let you say
Types alone do not make an architecture; invariants do. Shapezo's pipeline content model enforces four. First, single sourcing: every fact lives on exactly one entity, and renders may only reference, never copy. Second, segment closure: a segment record is invalid unless method, consequence class and restoration commitment are all present, which prevents the classic failure of a frozen alignment with no story. Third, crossing completeness: a route cannot freeze while any crossing lacks a protection method, because an unprotected crossing is not a design decision but a deferred argument. Fourth, spool boundary integrity: spool boundaries must coincide with segment boundaries or declared field welds, never with arbitrary stations, or the fabrication shop inherits geometry it cannot build.
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