ManiVault Example Plugins

_{(ManiVault version 0.9)}

ManiVault can currently be extended by six types of plugins, each dedicated to a specific functionality. Here, you can find exemplary implementations for each plugins type that can be used as a starting point for new plugins:

• Analysis: general analytics methods, e.g., dimensionality reduction
• Transformation: produces new data in the same shape as the input, e.g., normalizations
• Data: defines data types
• Loader/Writer: load data into the system or write them to disk
• View: visualize data and provide interaction, e.g., using OpenGL or JavaScript backends

Installation & Building

Manual

Requirements

• ManiVault Studio (https://github.com/ManiVaultStudio/Core)
• CMake 3.17+ (https://cmake.org/)
• Qt 6.3.1+ (https://www.qt.io/download), additional libraries: Qt WebEngine, Qt WebChannel, Qt Positioning and the Qt5 Compatibility Module
• A C++17 compatible compiler
  • For Windows: Visual Studio 2019 or 2022 (https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/downloads/)
• Optionally: Git (https://git-scm.com/)

Download

Be sure to first have ManiVault installed before continuing to download this repository. You can do the latter in any way you like, for example by downloading a .zip file of this repository (https://github.com/ManiVaultStudio/ExamplePlugins/archive/refs/heads/master.zip) or with

git clone https://github.com/ManiVaultStudio/ExamplePlugins.git

With SSH this would be:

git clone [email protected]:ManiVaultStudio/ExamplePlugins.git

After unzipping you should have an ExamplePlugins-master, after cloning you should have an ExamplePlugins folder, after navigating to this folder, continue with the next step.

Project setup

You'll need to define a ManiVault_DIR variable and provide it to CMake, as described in the ManiVault install guide. This variable is used to find your local ManiVault installation and defines an install location for the example plugins.

For Windows, using the CMake GUI:

1. Launch CMake (available here: https://cmake.org/)

2. In the source code field browse to the ExamplePlugins-master or ExamplePlugins folder (which contains CMakeLists.txt).

3. In the build field browse to the ExamplePlugins-master/build or ExamplePlugins/build folder. It will create it if it doesn't exist.

   The source and build fields in your cmake should now roughly look like this:

   Source: C:/YourOwnFolder/ExamplePlugins-master
Build: C:/YourOwnFolder/ExamplePlugins-master/build

4. Press Configure and select the Visual Studio 15 2019 (or 17 2022) generator with the optional platform of x64. If it is not available, be sure to install Visual Studio. Press Finish to configure the project.

5. CMake should now ask you to provide an ManiVault_DIR path that points to where ManiVault is installed. Double click the ManiVault_DIR variable and press the small button on the right to browse to the folder where ManiVault Studio is installed. (The folder containing either or both the Debug and Release folder).

6. A lot of red paths should now appear. Check that the ones pointing to Qt directories seem correct and then press Generate to generate the Visual Studio solution. If it is asking you for a Qt6_DIR please refer to CMake cannot find my Qt Installation.

7. Press Open Project to launch Visual Studio and the example project.

Compiling

For Windows:

1. At the top of Visual Studio set the build mode (where it says Debug) to Release.
2. Right click the project ALL_BUILD in the Solution Explorer and select Properties.
3. In the Configuration Properties -> Debugging set the Command by browsing to your ManiVault Studio.exe file. Set the Working Directory field by browsing to the folder containing the ManiVault Studio.exe file.
4. Press Apply and OK and right click the project in the Solution Explorer and press Build.
5. If all is well the build should succeed and if you run the project with Ctrl+F5 it will launch ManiVault Studio.exe and load the Example project as an available plug-in.

Automated using DevBundle (available for BioVault team members)

The preferred approach to building the example plugins is by using our DevBundle tool. This cross-platform tool creates self-contained development environments using build configurations in JSON format. Since the build environments are self-contained, multiple build environments can exist side-by-side. The major advantage of using DevBundle is that it will remove much of the configuration overhead by:

• Cloning repositories from the build configuration (with the branch specified in the build configuration)
• Downloading related binary dependencies from our Artifactory server (and adding/configuring paths in the CMakeLists.txt)
• Setting up an umbrella CMakeLists.txt which consists of all projects from the build configuration

Note: the allmain build config in the DevBundle config.json contains an example of how to add the example plugins to a build configuration.