OMNeT⁠+⁠+ IDE Developers Guide

Once PDE is installed, we can create a small example Hello World plug-in. This plug-in will place a menu item on the main menubar. Invoking the menu item will launch a simple dialog.

Choose File | New | Project… from the menu. The New Project wizard dialog comes up, with project type selection on the first page. Choose Plug-in Project from the Plug-in Development group and click Next.

On the next page, enter org.example.hello for project name, then click Next. On the following page (Content), you can just click Next as well. The following page allows you to choose the initial content for your project from among several code examples. Choose Hello, World, then click Finish.

A new project named org.example.hello will be created.

The IDE will also ask you if you want to switch to the Plug-in Development perspective; answer Yes.

Open the project and explore the generated files. There are two important files that are often used during plug-in development: plugin.xml and MANIFEST.MF. They both contain metadata that describe how your plug-in should be used by the platform.

MANIFEST.MF contains basic information about your plug-in. External dependencies, name, version number etc. The plugin.xml file describes what your plug-in contributes to the platform. You should always specify your contributions otherwise they will not appear on the user interface.

Double-click on one of the above files. This will start a form editor with several pages. Explore the possibilities. Later you can add other plug-ins here you are depending on, or you can specify what Java packages you plan to provide to other plug-ins. On he first page, there are useful shortcuts to export your plug-in in a deployable format (JAR file).

Of course you can have other files inside the plug-ins. You will need .class files (containing your code of course) or image resources for icons.

On the Overview tab click the Launch an Eclipse application link

A new instance of Eclipse will be started containing the generated plug-in. If everything is OK you should see a Sample Menu containing a Sample Action. When clicked, it will bring up a message dialog.

Use the Export plug-in link on the Overview page of the manifest editor.

Choose Directory radio button for Destination, specify directory name, and click [Finish]

The plug-in will be generated as <dirname>/plugins/aaaa_1.0.0.201001061910.jar

Once you have a final, exported plug-in in a deployable format you have to copy it into your Eclipse installation (<omnetpp>/ide/dropins). You should restart the IDE so it can recognize it.

The OMNeT++ IDE can load plug-ins from the workspace (projects) as well. This can be useful if you have implemented an extension that is useful only for certain type of project. (e.g. a plug-in helping to assign IP addresses to hosts should be active only if the INET project is open).

Open an existing OMNeT++ project (e.g. aloha). Create a folder named plugins.

Copy the exported plug-in file (jar) into the plugins folder.

It should be activated automatically. If you delete it, or close the project it should disappear. If you replace it with a new version, it will be updated.

Developing a plug-in for the OMNeT⁠+⁠+ IDE is exactly the same how you would develop a normal Eclipse plug-in. In addition to Eclipse API, you can access the API provided by the OMNeT⁠+⁠+ specific plug-ins. These plug-ins allow you to browse, access and even modify the data structures representing the NED and MSG files. To access OMNeT⁠+⁠+ specific APIs, you first have to add the appropriate OMNeT⁠+⁠+ plug-in as a dependency to your plug-in.

Double click on the plugin.xml file in your plug-in project and open the dependencies page. Add the org.omnetpp.ned.model and the org.omnetpp.ned.core plug-in as a dependency. (Also add org.eclipse.core.resources. We will need it for our example later.)

We will modify our earlier Hello world example to print out the number of NED types in all open projects. Note that this is not the same as the number of NED files. Some NED files may contain more than one type while others contain none at all (e.g. package.ned). We can access the internal NED model via the NEDResources class.

Open the SampleAction.java file and modify its content:

public void run(IAction action) {
  MessageDialog.openInformation(
    window.getShell(), "NED Info",
    "Number of NED types: "+NEDResources.getInstance().
        getNedTypesFromAllProjects().size());
}

The parsed model of all NED files can be accessed via the NEDResources.getInstance() singleton object. The NEDResources class is the main entry point to access and manipulate the content of NED files. If you know the fully qualified name of a type, you can obtain its type descriptor (INedTypeInfo) using the getToplevelNedType() method. There are numerous other ways to access and query the NED types. Check the documentation of the NEDResources and INedTypeInfo class.

Similarly, you can access information about message files using the MsgResources.getInstance() method. Check the documentation of the IMsgTypeResolver and IMsgTypeInfo interfaces for further information.

If you want to work with projects or files in your plug-in, there are several useful classes that can help you. The ProjectUtils class from the org.omnetpp.common plug-in can be used to enumerate open or referenced projects, or NED folders. You can add OMNeT⁠+⁠+ support to existing projects.

If you add org.omnetpp.common to your project dependencies, you can use CDTUtils to enumerate C⁠+⁠+ source or excluded folders. MakefileToools and 'MetaMakemake` from org.omnetpp.cdt are used to control the Makefile generation.

The OMNeT⁠+⁠+ plug-ins define some extension points that can be used to change or extend the current functionality of the IDE.

From org.omnetpp.common: