Why Add to Event?

Extending Plug-in Capabilities

The ProvideX plug-in has been designed to allow additional functionality to be added without requiring a large effort. The current version of the plug-in provides two methods to accomplish this.

Enhance Existing Events
Add new logic around the existing events (or logic) in the plug-in. This provides a mechanism for integrating with existing tools and methodologies for managing source code and documenting the history of an application.
External Tools
Add links to connect to external tools that are not directly associated with any of the events in the current ProvideX plug-in.

Enhance Existing Event

This section will discuss the steps required to enhance an existing event. This is accomplished by building an observer that will be notified when an event is triggered and can then add functionality to the event.

The new functionality can be triggered before and/or after the built-in logic. When there are multiple observers, the order of processing may always be the same. Any observer that is created must not rely on information from another observer. Otherwise, if the other observer has not yet been notified, the information may not be available.

Register User-Defined Observers

A developer can write an extension (or contributed tool) following the steps described later in this documentation and place the programs into a directory on each workstation. This directory must also contain a file with the name 'classes.txt' to identify the programs to be registered with the plug-in. 

# this file contains the names of my user-defined Observer classes
eventName=del_dupe_remarks
eventName=showtext
# must have a line after last observer definition

As this example shows, the format of each line is:
eventName=<NameOfClass>

where <NameOfClass> is replaced by the name of the class definition to be loaded.