* Re-Ordering Plugins on the Tools Menu

[DavidNewton]

I hope I am missing something obvious here. I have currently 18 plugins on the tools menu and I like to organise them into blocks according to what they do. As far as I can find out the only way, for example, to put a plugin in at number 6 in my list is to remove all the plugins after 6 from the list put in the one I want and then replace the ones I have just removed in the new correct order. This is a pain and when I have done it I usually make some mistake.

I discovered from a post on this forum that the tools menu list is kept in a text file 'Plugins.fhdata' and editing this file using a text editor (and some care) is quicker and easier than the first method but even then it is messy and I assume that if a mistake is made then the tools menu will get messed up. I note also that such a change seems to have no immediate effect and some method is necessary to make FH reload it.

What would be nice is a simple direct method for reordering the tools menu, drag and drop would be nice. Is there a plugin to do this?

David

[tatewise]

No you are not missing anything.
It would certainly be useful to arrange the Tools menu Plugin order.

There is no Plugin to do that at present, but it would be a relatively simple task.

Even if the Plugins.fhdata file is corrupted, FH does not seem to mind.
It lists what it recognises and disregards the rest, often making corrections.

[DavidNewton]

Thanks Mike. '

There is no Plugin to do that at present, but it would be a relatively simple task.

I take it that means relative to your knowledge

However, I have made a start! on the easy bit. So far I have been able to extract the names of the existing plugins on the tools menu, in the order that they are now in, into an indexed table and I am fairly sure, although I haven't tried it yet, that I can reverse the process and plant a table of plugin names into the Tools menu. The sticking point is how to present them in a way which makes it easy to rearrange them, (rearranging the index numbers perhaps) into a new table. Any ideas anyone.

David

[carlineric]

I managed to do it the brute force way by editing the Plugins.fhdata file. You need to alter the number 'N' at the end of the [PluginN] line to bring the list of plugins into order.

Eric

[DavidNewton]

Eric

Brute force is how I have now learned to do it. In fact if you are not changing the number of plugins you only need to move the "Name=.." lines around and not get involved with any renumbering. Nevertheless it would be nice to have a simple drag'n'drop method.

David

[DavidNewton]

OK here is my first go at a plugin to do drag and drop reordering. For safety I both create a backup of the existing Plugins.fhdata and until fully tested I am writing the new list into Plugins.fhdata.new.
I have essentially no experience with IupLua so any comments are welcome. I ended up using a tree structure because I could not get drag and drop to work on a List structure.

A question: when i get it fully working how do I get FH to read the new data into the Tools menu?

David

[Jane]

A quick look at your plugin shows you have "hard coded" the file.

Rather than doing that I recommend using

sPluginListFile = fhGetContextInfo('CI_APP_DATA_FOLDER')..[[\General\Plugins.fhdata]]

To get the file at the start of the program, check if it exists and then use the variable each time you need to access the file.

I would also be tempted to rename the file before writing the new one, rather than copying the file in Lua.

Other than that it looks very good.

[DavidNewton]

Thanks for the comments Jane. I have made some changes as you suggested and am attaching a new version.

David

[tatewise]

Regarding you last question David, I think you just have to close and re-open FH.

In plugins:index#developer_guide|> Family Historian Plugins ~ Developer Guide there are lots of tips and advice including plugins:iup_hints_and_tips|> IUP GUI Builder Hints And Tips.

You may not have noticed, but when editing your Plugin the Help has direct links to the Lua/IUP Online Reference Manuals.

[DavidNewton]

Thanks Mike, I was slowly coming to the realisation that FH needed tp be restarted to allow the loading of the new menu. I can stop looking for another way.

I have seen the references to online manuals for both Lua and IUP but to be frank, for a beginner. the notes in the Knowledge base are more useful (although less extensive) and explain very clearly what is happening

David

[tatewise]

One minor simplification you cold make is to use:

for line in io.lines(sPluginListFile) do
...
end

instead of:

file=io.open(sPluginListFile,'r')
for line in file:lines() do
...
end
file:close()

It just saves the open and close, but for writing there is no way of avoiding them.

[DavidNewton]

Thanks Mike

Always useful to learn about these shortcuts. I have made that change in v0.3

David