Converting an Existing Application to a Plugin

You can convert an existing DE subapplication to become a plugin. The minimum steps that you need to perform to convert an existing sub-application to a plugin are as follows:

1. Register the subapplication as a plugin using the same appName and appTitle.
   You can execute existing scripts that install the subapplication with deInstallApp function because deInstallApp is updated such that if its second argument (t_appName) is being registered as a plugin with deRegPlugin, then deInstallPlugin is called to perform the installation.
2. Re-implement enable trigger, menu trigger, post install trigger, and/or exit trigger, if needed. In many cases, existing trigger code can be reused by wrapping it in a deo method.

For application that opens its own window, it is important to redefine the exit trigger because when you select the plugin on the submenu to remove it, the plugin gets a chance to close the window. In addition, the window closing procedure should call deRemovePlugin to remove itself from the design window.

Candidates of sub-applications that can be converted to a plugin include DE sub-applications that define the enable, menu, post-install triggers, and/or the exit trigger.

Related Topics

Registering a Design Editor Plugin