Plugin Creation

Getting started

Let's create a small Hello World plugin with a few basic functionalities.

All plugins should have their own individual folder in the scribeui_pyramid/modules/plugins directory.

Plugins are simply python modules that take advantage of Pyramid's extensibility.

As such, you first need an __init__.py file. In that file, you have to create a function named includeme that receives a config object. To have your models and views included automatically, your includeme function should look like this:

def includeme(config):
    config.scan('.')

And at that point, ScribeUI loads your module without any problems. But it doesn't do anything yet.

Adding some new Javascript and CSS to ScribeUI

If you wish to include static files, adding the following line to the includeme function will add a folder and its subfolder as a route for the application:

config.add_static_view(name='hellostatics', path='static')

For our example, let's create a simple file with the path scribeui_pyramid/modules/plugins/static/js/helloworld.js containing a simple jquery-ui dialog as an example:

jQuery(function() { $(document).ready(function(){
    var helloDialog = $('<div class="hello-world">Hello, World!</div>');
    $('body').append(helloDialog);
    helloDialog.dialog({                                              
        modal:false
    }).dialog('open');                                                
})});

This code should be pretty straightforward if you are familiar with jquery-ui.

As ScribeUI is mostly a single page app, if you want css and javascript files to be included directly into the home template, you need to add the files in a function such this:

def getIncludedFiles():
    return {'css':['hellostatics/css/helloworld.css'], # if you have any css files
            'js': ['hellostatics/js/helloworld.js']}

The css and js values are arrays so that you may add several javascript and css files to ScribeUI.

And thus, if you restart scribeui ( make restart for the development install, or restarting apache on a production setup), Hello world! should appear in an alert box.

Server-side functions

You can easily add models and views to your plugins. Models should be stored in a models.py file, and views in views.py (or in a folder named views, the mapcache plugin included with ScribeUI is an example of this)

We are going to edit our hello world plugin by formatting a bit of data with templates and getting it with javascript.

First, let's create a view in views.py:

from pyramid.view import view_config
from pyramid.renderers import render_to_response

class HelloWorldView(object):
    def __init__(self, request):
        self.request = request

    @view_config(
        route_name='helloworld',
        permission='view'
    )   
    def helloworld(self):
        data = [{
                "language": "English",
                "message": "Helloworld"
                },  
                {   
                "language": "French",
                "message": "Bonjour monde"
                },  
                {   
                "language": "Spanish",
                "message": "Hola mundo"
                }   
            ]   
        return render_to_response('scribeui_pyramid:modules/plugins/HelloWorld/templates/helloworld.jinja2',{"data":data})

This code names a route named helloworld, renders it to a template, passing it some data. The templates are using jinja2., served by Pyramid templating

Let's create a templates directory, with this basic template, called helloworld.jinja2:

<table><tr><th>Language</th><th>Message</th></tr>                     
{% for d in data %}                                                    
    <tr><td>{{ d['language']  }}</td><td>{{d['message']}}</td></tr>
{% endfor %}                     
</table>

Now, we need to add the route to the config. In __init__.py add the following line to the includeme function:

def getIncludedFiles():
   config.add_route('helloworld', '/helloworld')

After restarting ScribeUI, a table containing the data will be accessible at the /helloworld location.

Now, let's edit our javascript script to show the template in our popup:

jQuery(function() { $(document).ready(function(){
        $.ajax({url:"helloworld",success:function(result){
                var helloDialog = $('<div class="hello-world">'+result+'</div>');
                $('body').append(helloDialog);
                helloDialog.dialog({
                        modal:false
                }).dialog('open');
        }});
})});

And now you should see your popup appear when you launch ScribeUI!

Useful links

• Pyramid documentation
• Jinja2 Documentation