Plugin Development

[eschwartz]

Also, note that it is now important to rely on the plugin launcher's recorded preferences dir, since Sigil 0.9.2 has the ability to relocate the preferences dir via an environment variable.

I have mentioned that at portableapps.com so hopefully they will be using that once they publish a portable Sigil 0.9.2

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

Also, note that it is now important to rely on the plugin launcher's recorded preferences dir, since Sigil 0.9.2 has the ability to relocate the preferences dir via an environment variable.

Very good point. I don't know of any plugins that really utilize a "hackish" method of determining the prefs directory, but if there are ... they should probably think about switching to the discussed method. But in reality, any method that computes the path to the preferences directory as a parent directory of the current running plugin's location should still be OK. the plugins are IN the prefs directory, afterall.

[KevinH]

This is a head's up for all plugin developers. In my dev tree I have made changes to support the following new plugin.xml tag.

<autostart>true</autostart>

If this tag is found in your plugin.xml, Sigil will automatically do the equivalent of hitting the start button for the user when your plugin is launched. If it is set to false or is not found at all, the current behaviour is utilized - in other words the user will have to manually hit the Start button.

Therefore this change should be completely backwards compatible and my plan is to add it for the next release of Sigil unless there is no interest from plugin developers.

Also, if there is interest from plugin developers, I could also add an:

<autoclose>true</autoclose>

tag to the plugin.xml that will automatically close the plugin dialog if and only if the return value from the plugin is 0.

Please let me know what you think of the autostart capability and if you would like an autoclose tag as well.

Thanks,

KevinH

[rubeus]

I would appreciate both

[Doitsu]

Both would be extremely helpful for validation plugins.

[KevinH]

Hi Doitsu,

Validation plugins that report no errors (return an error value of 0 from run()) should already autoclose.

That said, I went and added support for autoclose to my tree as well.

If anyone builds their own, grab master today and you should have both for testing with.

Take care,

KevinH

Originally Posted by Doitsu

Both would be extremely helpful for validation plugins.

[DiapDealer]

That's quite lovely, thanks!

[rubeus]

I'm adding a file with

bk.addfile(uid, basename, data, mt)

but its missing in the spine What am i doing false?

[KevinH]

You have to add it to the spine. You can add many file types that should not be added directly to the spine.

[rubeus]

Originally Posted by KevinH

You have to add it to the spine. You can add many file types that should not be added directly to the spine.

Ok, when i use

bk._w.spine.append((uid, None))

i get

Traceback (most recent call last):

  File "C:\Program Files\Sigil\plugin_launchers\python\launcher.py", line 301, in <module>

    sys.exit(main())
  File "C:\Program Files\Sigil\plugin_launchers\python\launcher.py", line 268, in main
    ps.launch()
  File "C:\Program Files\Sigil\plugin_launchers\python\launcher.py", line 149, in launch

    container._w.write_opf()
  File "C:\Program Files\Sigil\plugin_launchers\python\wrapper.py", line 268, in write_opf
    data = utf8_str(self.build_opf())
  File "C:\Program Files\Sigil\plugin_launchers\python\wrapper.py", line 256, in build_opf

    data.append(self.build_spine_xml())
  File "C:\Program Files\Sigil\plugin_launchers\python\wrapper.py", line 230, in build_spine_xml
    for (id, linear, properties) in self.spine:
ValueError: need more than 2 values to unpack

[KevinH]

No, you should not use calls to the wrapper directly. ie. not bk._w ...

The correct call is direct to the bk object. See the bookcontainer.py code in the developers manual.

bk.spine_insert_before(pos, sid, linear, properties=None)

If you set the position, pos, to -1 or something greater than the number of current spine entries, it will append it to the end of the current spine.

[rubeus]

Sorry i'm to dumb for that, what is linear?

bk.spine_insert_before(-1, uid, linear, properties=None)

inserts the file, but then some lines appear in the launcher and disappears to fast to be read and the spine entry isnt present

[KevinH]

That is the spine itemref linear attribute. You can set it to None for default.
According to the spec, it determines if the referenced content is "primary" or not. It takes values "yes", "no", and can be left out entirely by setting it to None which then defaults to "yes".

[KevinH]

I will test this from my end and get back to you soon.

KevinH

[rubeus]

Originally Posted by KevinH

That is the spine itemref linear attribute. You can set it to None for default.
According to the spec, it determines if the referenced content is "primary" or not. It takes values "yes", "no", and can be left out entirely by setting it to None which then defaults to "yes".

Sorry, but i cant get this working.

    uid = 'T12345' 
    bk.addfile(uid, 'Test0001.xhtml', xml, 'application/xhtml+xml')
    bk.spine_insert_before(-1, uid, None, properties=None)

Traceback (most recent call last):

  File "C:\Program Files\Sigil\plugin_launchers\python\launcher.py", line 301, in <module>

    sys.exit(main())
  File "C:\Program Files\Sigil\plugin_launchers\python\launcher.py", line 268, in main

    ps.launch()
  File "C:\Program Files\Sigil\plugin_launchers\python\launcher.py", line 149, in launch
    container._w.write_opf()
  File "C:\Program Files\Sigil\plugin_launchers\python\wrapper.py", line 268, in write_opf
    data = utf8_str(self.build_opf())
  File "C:\Program Files\Sigil\plugin_launchers\python\wrapper.py", line 256, in build_opf

    data.append(self.build_spine_xml())

  File "C:\Program Files\Sigil\plugin_launchers\python\wrapper.py", line 230, in build_spine_xml
    for (id, linear, properties) in self.spine:
TypeError: 'NoneType' object is not iterable