Tutorial on Plugins

[Marcus Wolschon]

On Fri, Apr 3, 2009 at 9:39 PM, Sebastian Held <sebastian.held at gmx.de> wrote:

> The page "Building" was already there and that seems to be the best
> place to put this tutorial in (the best place I had write permissions to).
> APIs - yes, good point. But I do not know ;) As far as I currenty
> believe, the plugin is able to use the full power of GnuCash (it's in the
> same address space). Some concept similiar to swig should be used to
> dynamically link to the GnuCash modules, but a static link will
> do, too (I guess).
>
> The future vision should be: a development kit, which allows for
> external plugin development; full dynamic linking; a modifieable GnuCash
> infrastructure (already discussed on the list to eventually be made from
> look up tables) for hooking into existing functions...
>
> Let's start with the simple things. The next thing I like to do, is to
> add a small glade example and use this knowledge to finally get my
> customer import module finished.

Sounds good.
You have have a look at the JavaPluginFramework (eclipse) -based
plugin-API and the fancy scripting-support I wrote for
http://apps.sourceforge.net/mediawiki/jgnucashlib/index.php
to get a few ideas. If nothing else then at least how pugins and
the hooks they plug into can be nicely documented in a Mediawiki. ;)

If this turns out to have the hooks I need for my code to plug into
I may even change my code to use the "real" Gnucash for the
code that saves me so much time every weekend.
(Not all plugins are public as some are so highly specific to my
  business that I cannot refactor the business-specific part into
  scripts to a generic scripting-api..)

Marcus