Revision as of 13:02, 6 December 2010

The plugin.xml file is an important and mandatory part of any plug-in for AIBench/OptFlux.

• All the Operations/Views/Icons/GUIs will be herein declared.
• The only artifact that does not required declaration in the plugin.xml file are the Datatypes.

Global Structure of the plugin.xml file

• The plugin.xml file begins with the declaration of the <plugin start=[value] tag. Here, [value] equals either a boolean value (true or false). We will use false as default. This value is only true for some core plug-ins since they will be loaded first by the plug-in engine.
  • All the information pertaining the plugin will be contained from this level on.
• The plug-in is terminated with the closing tag </plugin>

Global entries

There are three global entries pertaining the information of the plug-in itself:

1. <uid> ... </uid> - the unique identifier of the plug-in. A string that can be used to refer to this plug-in from another.
2. <name> ... </name> - the name of the plug-in. Any String used to be displayed as the name of the plug-in in certain places (plugin manager, logs, etc).
3. <version> ... </version> - the version of the plug-in. This can be used to differentiate between versions and is used by the plugin manager to resolve dependencies.

Sections

Dependencies

Lifecycle

Extensions

Extension Points

CORE: aibench.core.operation-definition (To declare new operations)

WORKBENCH: aibench.workbench.view (To declare new views or other graphical components)

Adding a new view for a datatype

Adding a new operation icon

Adding a new datatype icon

Adding a custom-made GUI for an operation (override default dynamic generation of input dialog)