JPF Code Generator

This is a handy little tool that generates classes for accessing the attributes and extensions of JPF plug-ins from plugin.xml files. This has the advantage of providing a strongly typed access to the plug-in and simplyfies working with plug-ins.

Run it using...

jar -jar jpfCodeGenerator-x.x.jar <comma separated plug-in locations> <overwrite:true|false>

...and pass it a comma separated list of plug-in locations (folders in which to search for plugin.xml) and a boolean whether generated files from previous runs should be overwritten.

The plugin.xml needs to contain the class attribute:

<plugin id="pluginID" version="0.1.0" class="com.example.MyPlugin">

or have an attribute with id "helperClassName" set:

<attributes>
   <attribute id="jpfcodegen">
      <attribute id="helperClassName" value="com.example.MyPluginHelper"/>
   </attribute>
</attributes>

so that the script knows which class to generate.

The script will generate two files (in a src-folder in the same folder as the plugin.xml):

com.example.MyPlugin

and

com.example.generated._MyPlugin

_MyPlugin contains all the essential method for accessing the attributes and extensions of the plug-in but will be regenerated when you re-run the code generator. All customizations should thus be put into MyPlugin (which extends _MyPlugin), which by default is not recreated. To recreate MyPlugin also, pass true as a second parameter to the script.

If you choose to use the attribute helperClassName version, then a separate class is generated that is independent of the plugin-class (you don't even need one at all).

Examples / Tutorials

The source distribution of the code generator comes with the following examples / tutorials:

Downloads

Configuration

There are a couple of attributes that can be used to configure the code generation behavior of the JPF code generator. Each attribute needs to be defined in the <attributes>-element of the plugin.xml as a sub-attribute of an attribute with id jpfcodegen

An example of how to tell the code generator to create a standalone helper class with class name com.example.MyPluginHelper in the src two levels up from the location of the plugin.xml:

<attributes>
   <attribute id="jpfcodegen">
      <attribute id="helperClassName" value="com.example.MyPluginHelper"/>
      <attribute id="targetDir" value="../../src/"/>
   </attribute>
</attributes>

Dependencies

Version / Todo

Release Announcements

0.3 - 2007-07-11

Hi Guys,
  version 0.3 of the code generator is ready. It comes with better documentation 
(a tutorial at http://www.inf.fu-berlin.de/~oezbek/jpf/tutorials/basic/) and 
some additional features like nested extension-point-parameters. I also 
added a small homepage for it at http://www.inf.fu-berlin.de/~oezbek/jpf/
where you will also find the link for downloading it.

Suggestions and comments are highly welcome: Send them to oezi[at]oezi.de

Cheers,
  Christopher

0.2 - 2007-07-05

 
Hi Guys,
  I have just extended the code generator a little bit to also support 
extension-point parameter multiplicity, attributes of type fixed and
a standalone mode:

1.) If you have a parameter with a multiplicity that might result in several
    parameter values:

<parameter-def type="string" id="name" multiplicity="any"/>

then this will now generate this code:

public Collection<String> getNames(){
  return getStringParameters("name");
}

2.) If you have a parameter with a type fixed then this will be mapped to
    an enum in Java:

<parameter-def type="fixed" id="alignment" custom-data="left|right|top|bottom"/>

will generate:

public enum Alignment {
    LEFT, RIGHT, TOP, BOTTOM;
}

public Alignment getAlignment(){
    return Alignment.valueOf(getStringParameter("alignment").toUpperCase());
}

3.) If you don't want to use the plugin class-attribute as a target
    class to generate, you can now also use plugin-attributes to define 
    the name of the class to generate:

<attributes>
   <attribute id="helperClassName" value="com.example.MyPluginHelper"/>
</attributes>

4.) The Code Generator also now comes in 3 handy jars:

http://page.mi.fu-berlin.de/oezbek/jpf/JPFCodeGenerator-0.2.jar 
  -> The code generator as a binary package to run using
  
java -jar JPFCodeGenerator-0.2.jar <comma separated plug-in locations> <overwrite:true|false>

http://page.mi.fu-berlin.de/oezbek/jpf/JPFCodeGenerator-0.2-rt.jar

The runtime dependencies needed to use the generated classes, add 
this to your buildpath in the project.

http://page.mi.fu-berlin.de/oezbek/jpf/JPFCodeGenerator-0.2-src.jar

The source code if anybody is interested to play with it.

Cheers,
  Christopher

Contact & License

This tool was created as part of the ongoing migration in the JabRef reference manager to move to a modular plug-in architecture and is released under the LGPL 3.0.

JPF Code Generator - 0.4

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