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This tutorial aims at showing how to get started on GroIMP plugin development. It is assumed that you are able to compile the plugin using Maven (either the plugin alone, or the whole project). In this tutorial we are going to create a new plugin (from the empty template), add a new MimeType (format of file accepted by GroIMP) for both import and export, and add a menu item that run a specific command.

See:

Initialize the plugin

Download a template

First download the default empty template from the repository.

Once downloaded, you should have a directory called newplugin-maven, which contains a src folder, a pom.xml file, and some additional files for deployment (which we will not modify here). You can, and should, rename the directory with the name you want for your plugin. For the rest of this tutorial, the directory is called newplugin.

We can start editing it using a text editor/ or IDE (e.g. Eclipse) of your choice.

Change the main data

A plugin requires to: have a maven (pom) file working, and a groimp (plugin.xml) file working.

Pom file

Let's start with the maven file:

It needs a parent version in the following replace the x.x by the version of GroIMP you want to use. Here we can use 2.1.5,

 <parent>
    <artifactId>GroIMP</artifactId>
    <groupId>de.grogra</groupId>
    <version>x.x</version>
  </parent>

The plugin needs a java name, this is the java identifier of the plugin. Here we can use template.plugin.tutorial.

<artifactId>template.plugin.tutorial</artifactId>

Any additional dependencies to other java package (including GroIMP package) need to be declared,

</dependency>
    <dependency>
      <groupId>de.grogra</groupId>
      <artifactId>graph</artifactId>
      <version>x.x</version>
    </dependency>
 
    ...
 
  </dependencies>

Replace x.x by the version you want to use, 2.1.5 for instance.

Plugin xml

Now, we need to change the GroIMP files, go in the directory src/main/resources and open plugin.xml:

The plugin id should match the java id:

<plugin
  id="de.grogra.template.plugin.tutorial"
  ...

The file name must match the directory name:

  <library file="newplugin" prefixes="{de.grogra.template.plugin.tutorial}"/>

All imports must also be declared here:

  <import plugin="de.grogra.graph"/>
  ...

Plugin properties

Now edit the plugin.properties file to update the plugin name, it needs to match the directory name:

pluginName = newplugin

Java module and package info

Now we need to change the base java files: the module-info and the package name. First, open the src/main/java/module.info file and update the plugin name:

module template.plugin.tutorial {
	exports de.grogra.template.plugin.tutorial;
 
	requires graph;
}

The module name needs to be the same as the <artifactId>template.tutorial</artifactId> from the pom.xml file.
The exports de.grogra.template.plugin.tutorial; must match the java package name, i.e. the name of the sub folders from here.
All dependencies must be declared here with requires ….

Then, the name of the package should be updated, we just called it de.grogra.template.tutorial, so open the sub folders de, then grogra, then template

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