Plugins framework

The directory plugins allows to develop plugins which propose specific functionalities without incurring any dependencies from the core application: if the plugins directory is not present of any plugin is missing, the application should continue to work without any problem.

The project provides two built-in plugins:

• The DOCX generation plugin which allows to generate a DOCX document rather than an HTML site
• The PDF generation plugin which allows to generate a PDF document rather than an HTML site
• The Scripts plugin which allows to add customized content in a wiki before generating the output

Plugin structure

A Plugin is simply a Jar file with a specific property in its Manifest specifying where to look for the Plugin class. The Manifets must contain the following property:

  docJPluginFactory: <The plugin factory class>

The plugin factory class must be a class implementing the PluginFactory interface.

Plugin factory implementation

The PluginFactory implementation is a class which must implement the following interface:

public interface PluginFactory

Method Summary

Modifier and Type	Method and Description
void	getCustomProperties() Return the CustomProperties (default is null, which means that there are no custom properties)
public	getElementHook(DirectoryParser parser, HookContext context) Return the ElementHook defined by this factory. Return null by default. Note that you must implement the hasElementHook() method accordingly. Parameters context - The HookContext context parser - The directory parser
void	getID() Return the factory ID. Must be unique for each Plugin
void	getSupportedOutputFormat() Return the supported output format (default is null, which means that no specific output format is supported)
public	hasElementHook() Return true if this factory provides an ElementHook. Return false by default. Note that you must implement the getElementHook() method accordingly
public	newDirectoryWriter() Return a new Directory writer (default is null, which means that no specific DirectoryWriter is provided). Note that you should provide a DirectoryWriter if the getSupportedOutputFormat() method does not return null

Use cases

Providing a new output format

To provide a new output format, you must implement the following methods:

• PluginFactory.getSupportedOutputFormat() to get the output format supported by the Plugin
• PluginFactory.newDirectoryWriter() to create a directory writer generating in this format

Supporting custom properties

If the Plugin supports specific custom properties, you should implement the getCustomProperties() method. Custom properties are usable both on the command-line and configuration file.

Note that if you define some of these properties in the command-line, they will be parsed only if you define them after specifying the docx output type. For example, this will not work:

      java -jar docGenerator.jar -input=wiki/input -output=wiki/output -hasTOC=false -outputType=docx

But this will work:

      java -jar docGenerator.jar -input=wiki/input -output=wiki/output -outputType=docx -hasTOC=false

Modifying the wiki content before the generation

To modify the wiki source tree content before the generation, you must implement the following methods:

• PluginFactory.getElementHook(DirectoryParser, HookContext) to get the hook which will be used to perform the modifications. It will only be taken into account if the PluginFactory.hasElementHook() method return true
• PluginFactory.hasElementHook() to specify that the factory provides a hook which will be used to perform the modifications. If you return true, you will need to implement the PluginFactory.getElementHook(DirectoryParser, HookContext) method

Note that the Scripts plugin does use this capability.