Overview of Creating a New Plug-In Type

As previously discussed, while SIMULIA provides various types of plug-ins that can be generated, Isight also offers the ability to add a new type of plug-in to the system.

The ability to add a new type of plug-in to the system is useful for when you are developing a component and you want to represent some functionality in the component using a plug-in so that it can be easily extended. For example, The Plate Example describes how you can use a plug-in to represent the shape of the plate so that new shapes can be added to extend the capability of the Plate component. Thus, if you want to create plug-ins for some specific functionality, you must first create what is called a plug-in generator to represent that plug-in type.

If the type of plug-in you want to create is already defined in the Isight system, you do not need to carry out the process described in this section.

The creation of a plug-in generator requires you to:

  • Extend a few specific required Java classes.

  • Write an XML descriptor file.

  • Create a jar file containing the Java classes and XML descriptor.

  • Publish the plug-in generator jar file.

These steps are described in the following sections.