Creating a plugin (Part 2)

Advanced features for plugin

Section(s): back office, community, front office, learning, plugin

Important notes

It is assumed that you just complete the part 1 of the tutorial.
It is important to keep in mind a few rules about plugins. There is nothing that will prevent you from braking the rules, but it will make your work much more difficult if you bypass them.

• A plugin is independent from any other plugin. It should not require another plugin to be installed to be used.
• You should never modify a plugin you're not the author of. If you want to change an existing plugin, duplicate the existing one, rename the copy and work with it.
• Embeded JARs containing java classes you wrote should also contain the source (.java files)

Adding parameters to a plugin

As we have seen in part 1 of this tutorial, a plugin must define a config.xml file in its /config directory. Let's edit our helloworld plugin config file and change it to this content :

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<root>
  <info>
    <site>http://wms.wedia-group.com/resources/knowledge-base/plugins/creating-a-plugin-@/111/view-62-article.html</site>
    <authors>WEDIA</authors>
    <description></description>
    <example></example>
    <faq></faq>
    <installation></installation>
    <requires></requires>
    <version>1.0.0</version>
  </info>
  <parameters>
       <parameter name="hello_to" description="Who should the plugin say hello to" type="string" mandatory="false" default="John Doe" value=""/>
     </parameters>
</root>

If you go back to the plugin list page and click on the configure (http://localhost:8080/wms/admin/plugin/view?action=edit&name=helloworld) link on the helloworld line, you should see something like :


Now you can set a new value for hello_to parameter for let's say "Guillaume".
If you then edit the /bov2/dataindex/blocs/bookmarks_before.jsp file and change it for the following code :

<%@page pageEncoding="ISO-8859-15" %>
<%@taglib prefix="noheto" uri="/WEB-INF/noheto.tld" %>
<%@taglib prefix="c" uri="/WEB-INF/c.tld" %>
<noheto:skipPage test="${not pageContext.request.included}"/>
<h1>Hello <c:out value="${plugin.parameters.hello_to.value}"/></h1>
<a href="<c:url value="${plugin.pagePath}entrypoint.jspz"/>">Entry point</a>	

• string (for small string parameter)
• boolean (true false value choice)
• int (for integer number)
• text (for longer text - with a textarea)
• password (for password - value not visible )
• mail (for mail - will return a String in plugin parameters map, will check if is an email address)

Note: When editing parameters from the web console, you will be informed wether a parameter is valid or not. Nevertheless, an invalid parameter will not prevent you from saving or activating the plugin.

The IPlugin interface

Once you are in a JSP that belongs to a Plugin, an object set in the request attributes implementing the com.noheto.plugins.IPlugin interface is available with the key plugin.
With this object, you can retrieve plugin informations such as name, version... (have a look at the API documentation) but also parameters values:
${plugin.parameters[parameter_name].value}
There are other usefull methods for getting paths easily:

• getPagePath will return path part containing page directory name and trailing '/', that's why we wrote <c:url value="${plugin.pagePath}entrypoint.jspz"/>
• getResourcePath will return path part containing res directory and trailing '/'. Images, javascript resources, cascading style sheets and other static resources can be embedded in a plugin in the res directory. This method helps to retrieve paths
• invoke This method is used to invoke static methods from objects. We will explain with more details in  the third part of this tutorial.