Plugin Development¶

Creating a Plugin¶

This section will walk you trough all the steps of creating your own plugin.

Categories¶

Plugins are stored in the plugins folder and every sub-directory of it resembles a category in the operations box of the main program. If you want to add a plugin to a pre-existing category, add it to the corresponding folder. Else create a new folder with the desired category name and work in there.

If you add a new category to the program you must also add a “CatClass.py” file to this directory with the following contents:

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from yapsy.IPlugin import IPlugin

class PluginClassName(IPlugin):
        name = "PluginClassName"

def ReturnClass():
        return  PluginClassName

In this file PluginClassName should be replaced with a clear name of the class you use. (very often something like I[InsertCategory]Plugin is used) This class is a cast of IPlugin which is part of yapsy. This class casting is required because yapsy uses the class type used for plugins to determine to what category they belong.

Designing the plugin¶

When creating the plugin there is a very precise process you must follow.

The plugin that is created must be in a class that is cast using the appropriate category. Meaning that if you for example have a “Spectral Operations” plugin you must start the plugin as follows:

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class HeatMapPlugin(CatClass.ISpectralPlugin):
        def Run(self,FilePath,FileName,CurrentProject,WorkFolder,UserPref,Operation):
                """YOURPLUGINCODE"""

The main plugin MUST have a definition called “Run” which takes the following inputs, in this order:

1. self (Is required because it is a definition in a class, it’s not actually used)
2. FilePath (This is a list with strings which are the filepaths of all the files the user selected)
3. FileName (This is a list with strings which are the filenames of all the files the user selected)
4. CurrentProject (This is a string which contains the path to the current project folder.
5. WorkFolder (This is a string to the workfolder the user is using. Please use the “Temp” folder in the work folder for all your temporary files because this folder will be cleared when the program is exited) (This auto deletion is not implemented at the moment)
6. UserPref (The directory to the user preference file)
7. Operation (The name of the plugin, this can be found in the .yapsy-plugin file variable “Name”)

We put in as many variables here as possible to give possible developers as many variables as they want. In the future we plan to implement some basic functions which can convert these into arrays and dictionary’s. Right now the developer must use h5py and dask.array to open arrays for example.

Using support files in the plugin¶

When you have multiple support files in your plugin folder you can not simply import these as normal because when Python looks for modules to import it only looks in the directory associated to the launched main file, not any sub-directories. Normal python modules can still be imported normally. Below is an example of how these modules should be imported.

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import imp
ModuleName = imp.load_source("ModuleName","./plugins/CategoryFolder/FileName.py")

plugin Information File¶

If you have created your plugin and are happy with the final result it is time to tell yapsy that your plugin exists. This is done by creating a plugin info file. The contents of this file will tell yapsy what the name of the plugin is and where it is located. The commonplace is to put this file next to the plugin file and give it the same name. (to avoid confusion) This file must have the file extension ”.yapsy-plugin”. (yapsy searches for these files)

An other purpose of the .yapsy-plugin file is to give the user information about the plugin. When the user clicks with the right mouse button on the operation tree a popup menu will be given with a info option. This generates a dialog with the information from the .yapsy-plugin file.

The structure of this file must be as follows:

[Core]
Name = "Plugin Name"
Module = "File where plugin is located WITHOUT .py extension"

[Documentation]
Description = "Plugin Description"
Author = "Plugin Author"
Version = "Plugin Version Number"
Website = "Plugin website if exists"

[File Input Settings]
Input Files = {"ImageType":[minimum,maximum,group],"ImageType":[minimum,maximum,group],...}
Range for Number of Files = [min,max]

[Right Mouse Button Options](optinal)
Supported Files for Display = ["ImageType","ImageType",...]

[Extra Plugin Info](optinal)
References = "Reference used for the plugin"

[File Input Settings]
Input Files = {"Normalized_HSI":[1,1,0],"Ref_HSI":[2,None,1]}
Range for Number of Files = [3,None]

[File Input Settings]
Input Files ={"Grey":[1,1,0],"White":[1,1,0],"Black":[1,1,1],"HSI":[1,1,2]}
Range for Number of Files = [3,3]