How to create a plugin#

A plugin adds a page to a record, such as a sample, and a tab for it in the record’s navigation. You create one when your portal needs a page that belongs to a record and that FairDM does not draw.

Before you start#

You need an installed app of your portal. This guide uses an app called myapp and adds an Analysis page to every sample. Replace myapp with the name of your app.

Steps#

Create plugins.py in your app. FairDM imports the plugins module of every installed app at start-up, so no other step registers it.

Write the view and register it against the record type.

from django.utils.translation import gettext_lazy as _

from fairdm import plugins
from fairdm.core.sample.models import Sample
from fairdm.plugins import Plugin
from fairdm.views import FairDMTemplateView


@plugins.register(Sample, label=_("Analysis"), icon="chart", order=100)
class Analysis(Plugin, FairDMTemplateView):
    template_name = "myapp/plugins/analysis.html"
    page_title = _("Analysis")

List Plugin before the view class. label, icon and order set the tab, as listed under Registration in Plugins.

Create the template myapp/templates/myapp/plugins/analysis.html. The record is base_object.
```
{% extends "page_view.html" %}

{% block page.content %}
  <p>{{ base_object }}</p>
{% endblock page.content %}
```
Fill page.content. If you fill the outer content block instead, you replace the whole page, heading and layout included.

To add data of your own, override get_context_data.

def get_context_data(self, **kwargs):
    context = super().get_context_data(**kwargs)
    context["summary"] = summarise(self.base_object)
    return context

Start the portal and open a sample.

The result#

The sample has a tab called Analysis, ordered by order among the sample’s other tabs. The page is served at /samples/<uuid>/analysis/, and its URL name is sample:analysis. Reverse it from Python with the plugin helper:

from fairdm.plugins import reverse

reverse(sample, "analysis")

The address segment is the class name, slugified. Set url_path to choose your own, as listed in Plugins.

Everyone who can reach a sample can open the page, because the plugin states no rule. To restrict it, see How to restrict a plugin to some users. To give the plugin more pages, see How to add pages to a plugin.

A plugin can be registered against a project, dataset, sample, measurement or contributor. To register it against several, give register each model.