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User-Defined Plugins

Users can select from their own set of plugins in addition to predefined ones found in ~onl/stdPlugins/. In order to include your own plugins, you must tell the RLI where those plugins are located. (We will discuss how to define your own plugins later.) It is assumed that your own plugins are organized in the same way as those in ~onl/stdPlugins/. These are the rules that enable the RLI to recognize that a user-defined plugin exists:

You will tell the RLI where the parent directory of all of your plugin directories are located.
This user-defined parent plugin directory contains one plugin directory subdirectory for each user-defined plugin.
The name of each subdirectory has the format <Plugin Name<->Plugin ID>.
The plugin directory contains a compiled plugin module named combined.o.

Fig. 1. Adding a User-Defined Plugin Instance.

Fig. 1 shows how to tell the RLI the location of your personal plugin directory and the resulting appearance of the Add Instance menu when we attempt to add an instance of the stats:100 plugin (i.e., stats is the plugin name, and 100 is the plugin ID). The recipe is:

Window/Panel	Selection/Entry	Explanation
Port 6 Plugins	Edit => Add Plugin Directory	Open dialogue box asking for pathname of parent plugin directory
Dialogue Box	Enter full pathname	(not shown)
Port 6 Plugins	Edit => Add Instance => stats:100	Select user-defined plugin

Note that in this example, there were three predefined plugin classes and two user defined classes with a parent plugin directory path of /users/jst/plugins.

Revised: Wed, July 12, 2006

Tutorial >> Router Plugins	TOC