Gaphor plugin example.

The Gaphor UML modeling application provides an example hello world plugin. Obviously this plugin doesn't serve any useful purpose in the real world but it does give a good example of how Gaphor can be extended. The general layout for Gaphor plugins is similar to most Python packages. It has a setup.py module which enables the plugin to be installed independently of Gaphor.

Gaphor discovers new plugins through entry-points. The plugin must declare an entry-point that is available in the application. In this case, the hello world plugin wants to insert itself into gaphor.services.

The overall goal of the hello world plugin is to alter the menu in Gaphor and display a simple dialog. The actual plugin logic is contained in a single class called HelloWorldPlugin as illustrated below.



Here, the HelloWorldPlugin class provides both the IService and IActionProvider interfaces. The import items of interest are the menu_xml attribute and the helloworld_action() method.

The menu_xml attribute is an XML string that specifies where the new menu item for the plugin is placed within Gaphor.

The helloworld_action() method is responsible for implementing the action. In the case of the hello world plugin, it will display a dialog. Although not illustrated in the diagram, this method is actually decorated as an action. The decorator provides the action id, label, and tooltip.