Allow Plugins to install Automate Lists?

[KevinH]

Okay, here is another idea to help allow more complex or better plugins ...

What if we allow Plugins during their initial run to install their own automate lists for the user?

Automate lists allow for an extra parameter to be sent to any plugin. In an automate list you can pass any single line of text as a parameter to a plugin. And remember we now allow any name for an automate list with no real limits and automate lists build a similar launch menu to plugins.

So to make this clearer, one example would be a PrettyPrinterEditPCSS automate list to be installed for the user when PrettyPrinter is first launched. This list would pass an parameter to the PrettyPrinter plugin that would be used to change it from a silent runner of PrettyPrinter to an edit gui mode that would load up the prettyprinter.pcss into a QPlainTextEdit widget to allow the user to edit and change and save the prettyprinter.pcss file.

If we allow a plugin to install its own automate lists into the user's automate area, we can effectively provide a gui for the user to launch the plugin in a way that allows the plugin to use the automate parameter to control what or how the plugin works. In other words provide more than one menu entry for launching plugins.

I rarely use automate now, but something this would extend its usefulness considerably.


Thoughts?

[KevinH]

Or, I guess we could allow the plugin.xml to add additional menu entries with the additional menu name provided as a plugin parameter somehow?

Something like:

<addmenu>EditPCSS</addmenu>

The primary menu would always be the plugin name to maintain backwards compatibility but if these addmenu fields are found, then multiple menu entries are created such as:

PrettyPrinter
PrettyPrinter_EditPCSS

Obviously the lack of translation for menu items is already an issue and this would make it worse, but ...

[KevinH]

Or, I guess I could punt and look at the list of selected files in BookBrowser and if none are xhtml files, then run in gui mode to edit the pcss. A bit weird but doable without any changes to Sigil plugin management itself.