Tag Archives: plugin

Automated delivery of an ICN plug-in for continuous delivery

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Agile is in vogue. Chances are good that your boss asked you to set up a build server to build your plug-ins and deliver them. At some point you’ll ask yourself, how do I automatically refresh the plugin on my environment, meaning without going to the ICN desktop and click the load button.

Here are 4 options, there might be more of course:

  1. Copy the jar and restart the whole web server (all of then if cluster). This reloads the plug-ins from their jars but that’s not conceivable for a production platform.
  2. Copy the jar and restart the ICN application on the web server. This also reloads the plug-ins. It’s better but still not conceivable for a production environment, we don;t want any interruption.
  3. Use Selenium and write a procedure to open the admin desktop, go to your plug-in, click the Load button and save. This is actually good, there is no interruption, just a bit boring to write and not easy to integrate to a build server (requires Selenium, running the browser…).
  4. Fake the behavior of going to the admin desktop and clicking load by calling the ICN rest api. This is what I’m going to develop here.

How does it work, the basics

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Using an external JavaScript (not Dojo module) in your ICN plugin

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Sometimes you need to use an external JavaScript libraries in your plugin, because you don’t want to reinvent the wheel. Problem is that often those libraries are not Dojo modules. So how to use them in your dojo class?

Well that’s simple, dojo provides an generic script injection mechanism. Everything declared in the external script will be available in your class. Code is the following:

require(["http://host.com/stuff.js"], function(){
    // Everything declared in stuff.js is available here
});

You can link to an http location, or relative location into your project, for instance /application/stuff.js.

Now how to use that in your plugin? You can place your JavaScript file in another application or a CDN to refer it with an http protocole, example:

require(["http://host.com/application/stuff.js"], function(){
    // Everything declared in stuff.js is available here
});

Or you can leave the file in your plugin so everything is embedded when you deploy:

require(["plugin/MyPluginID/getResource/jszip/zip.js"], function () {
  // Here I can use the variable zip
});

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