EDMarketConnector/PLUGINS.md

EDMC Plugins

Plugins allow you to customise and extend the behavior of EDMC.

Writing a Plugin

Plugins are loaded when EDMC starts up.

Each plugin has it's own folder in the plugins directory:

• Windows: %LOCALAPPDATA%\EDMarketConnector\plugins
• Mac: ~/Library/Application Support/EDMarketConnector/plugins
• Linux: $XDG_DATA_HOME/EDMarketConnector/plugins, or ~/.local/share/EDMarketConnector/plugins if $XDG_DATA_HOME is unset.

Plugins are python files. The plugin folder must have a file named load.py that must provide one module level function and optionally provide a few others.

EDMC will import the load.py file as a module and then call the plugin_start() function.

def plugin_start():
   """
   Load this plugin into EDMC
   """
   print "I am loaded!"
   return "Test"

Plugin Hooks

Configuration

If you want your plugin to be configurable via the GUI you can define a frame (panel) to be displayed on its own tab in EDMC's settings dialog. The tab title will be the value that you returned from plugin_start. Use widgets from EDMC's myNotebook.py for the correct look-and-feel. You can be notified when the settings dialog is closed so you can save your settings.

You can use set(), get() and getint() from EDMC's config object to retrieve your plugin's settings in a platform-independent way.

import Tkinter as tk
import myNotebook as nb
from config import config

this = sys.modules[__name__]	# For holding module globals

def plugin_prefs(parent):
   """
   Return a TK Frame for adding to the EDMC settings dialog.
   """
   this.mysetting = tk.IntVar(value=config.get("MyPluginSetting"))	# Retrieve saved value from config
   frame = nb.Frame(parent)
   nb.Label(frame, text="Hello").grid()
   nb.Label(frame, text="Commander").grid()
   nb.Checkbutton(frame, text="My Setting", variable=this.mysetting).grid()

   return frame

Display

You can also have your plugin add an item to the EDMC main window and update it if you need to from your event hooks. This works in the same way as plugin_prefs(). For a simple one-line item return a tk.Label widget or a pair of widgets as a tuple. For a more complicated item create a ttk.Frame widget and populate it with other ttk widgets.

def plugin_app(parent):
   """
   Create a TK widget for the EDMC main window
   """
   label = tk.Label(parent, text="Status:")
   this.status = tk.Label(parent, anchor=tk.W, text="")
   return (label, this.status)
   
# later on your event functions can directly update this.status["text"]
this.status["text"] = "Happy!"

Events

Once you have created your plugin and EDMC has loaded it there are three other functions you can define to be notified by EDMC when something happens: journal_entry(), cmdr_data() and prefs_changed().

Your events all get called on the main tkinter loop so be sure not to block for very long or the EDMC will appear to freeze. If you have a long running operation then you should take a look at how to do background updates in tkinter - http://effbot.org/zone/tkinter-threads.htm

Journal Entry

This gets called when EDMC sees a new entry in the game's journal. state is a dictionary containing information about the Cmdr and their ship and cargo (including the effect of the current journal entry).

A special 'StartUp' entry is sent if EDMC is started while the game is already running. In this case you won't receive initial events such as "LoadGame", "Rank", "Location", etc. However the state dictionary will reflect the cumulative effect of these missed events.

def journal_entry(cmdr, system, station, entry, state):
    if entry['event'] == 'FSDJump':
        # We arrived at a new system!
        if 'StarPos' in entry:
            sys.stderr.write("Arrived at {} ({},{},{})\n".format(entry['StarSystem'], *tuple(entry['StarPos'])))
        else:
            sys.stderr.write("Arrived at {}\n".format(entry['StarSystem']))

Getting Commander Data

This gets called when EDMC has just fetched fresh Cmdr and station data from Frontier's servers.

def cmdr_data(data):
   """
   We have new data on our commander
   """
   sys.stderr.write(data.get('commander') and data.get('commander').get('name') or '')

The data is a dictionary and full of lots of wonderful stuff!

Configuration

This gets called when the user dismisses the settings dialog.

def prefs_changed():
   """
   Save settings.
   """
   config.setint('MyPluginSetting', this.mysetting.get())	# Store new value in config

Distributing a Plugin

To package your plugin for distribution simply create a .zip archive of your plugin's folder:

• Windows: In Explorer right click on your plugin's folder and choose Send to → Compressed (zipped) folder.
• Mac: In Finder right click on your plugin's folder and choose Compress.

If there are any external dependencies then bundle them within the plugin's folder and add the plugin's folder to Python's load path.

import sys
import os

# Add plugin's folder to Python's load path.
sys.path.append(os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__)))

# Assumes the dependency has been bundled in the plugin's folder.
import paho.mqtt.client as mqtt