Plugin System

• Introduction
• Installing existing Plugins
• Creating Plugins

Introduction

OmniDB 2.9 introduces the plugin system, a feature that allows users to develop and share their own features that can be plugged into OmniDB without having to deploy the whole application again.

Plugin file architecture

OmniDB is a web application written in python, so each plugin is a combination of javascript, python and other resources (such as images) that together implement the feature it was created for. Javascript files control OmniDB's interface while python files control what happens in the server side, the portion of code that actually communicates with the database.

Hooks

The plugin system is based on hooks that are located in different parts of the interface. Each plugin can subscribe to any hook and have a collection of API functions to perform different tasks, such as creating inner/outer tabs, creating tree nodes and calling python functions in the plugin's python code.

Installing existing Plugins

Every plugin must contain the exact file structure with at least the default files:

• plugins
  • PLUGIN_NAME
    • plugin.conf
    • plugin.py
• static
  • plugins
    • PLUGIN_NAME
      • plugin.js

These files are contained in a specific folder structure that respects OmniDB's architecture.

To install a plugin just extract its zip file, or copy the contents of its folder if you get it from this repository, to OmniDB's folder that contains the actual application:

OmniDB-server:

Linux:

/opt/omnidb-server/OmniDB_app

Windows:

C:/OmniDB-server/OmniDB_app

OmniDB-app:

Linux:

/opt/omnidb-app/resources/app/omnidb-server/OmniDB_app

Windows:

C:/OmniDB-app/resources/app/omnidb-server/OmniDB_app

OSX:

Right click on the app then -> Show Package Contents

Contents/Resources/app/app/omnidb-server/OmniDB_app

After installing the plugin you must restart OmniDB in order to load the python related files. When you access OmniDB with loaded plugins you can see them by clicking in the plugin icon on the top right part of the screen:

This test_plugin subscribes to a few hooks to show what the API can do. One of the hooks used is innerTabMenu called whenever the + tab is clicked in the inner tab list. This hook allows you to implement custom items in that context menu:

Creating Plugins

• Plugin API

To create a plugin you can start with an existing sample plugin (test_plugin, for instance), that already contains the required folder structure, and then modify the core files to implement your desired features.

You can use the Plugin API as a reference on to use all functions and hooks available so far. Checking existing plugins to have an idea of how to they are used is also helpful.

We strongly recommend that you install a python environment and develop your plugins using Django's development test server as it will be automatically restarted everytime a currently loaded python file is changed.

This link contains a description on how to install python and all requirements to run OmniDB. After everything is setup just go to the folder OmniDB/OmniDB and run:

python manage.py runserver

plugin.conf

Configuration file that contains basic information about the plugin.

plugin.js

Javascript file loaded when OmniDB's interface is started in the client. This file is the starting point to load other client side files such as other javascript files, libraries, css files, etc and to also subscribe to the API Hooks that will actually implement custom features.

plugin.py

Python file loaded when OmniDB is started. This file contains server side custom functions that can be called by the javascript API and can use the database object passed as argument to perform queries in the database.

Every plugin python function is called with 2 parameters:

• my_python_function(p_database_object, p_data)
  • p_database_object: OmniDB's database object that contains several attributes and functions to retrieve data from the database.
  • p_data: optional paramater to send data from the javascript side.