Plug-in manager
Plug-ins are additional Arelle modules which are installed at run-time and can be developed and managed independently of the Arelle distribution process. Each plug-in may add functionality to Arelle by (a) adding to GUI menus, (b) adding to command line (and web service) parameters, and (c) adding execution time functionality to built-in operations.
The plug-in manager allows installation, update, removal and deactivation/activation of plug-ins. The command-line version is described under Command Line operation. The GUI plug-in manager dialog features are:
Loading a plug-in
- To load a plugin from the local file system, under “Find plug-in modules” press the “Locally” button. A file chooser will allow selecting a plug in by its file name. The distributed plug-ins are under the plugin directory. Subpackages for sphinx and xbrlDB are in subdirectories where the “__init__.py” file is selected (Python’s entry file for the package).
- To load a plug from a web file, press the “OnWeb” button and enter a web URL. Only single-file plugins can be loaded this way. (Packages, which are directory structures of modules, can be loaded from the local file system).
Viewing and managing plug-ins
The top listbox shows loaded plug-in modules by their Name, Author, Version, Status (enabled or disabled), Date, whether an update (newer file date) is available, description, and license. Clicking on a plug-in provides further details in the lower panel (the columns are rendered as multi-line rows for easier reading. A selected plug-in in the lower panel also has three buttons:
- Enable/Disable toggle: changes the enablement status without uninstalling, useful for those plug-ins that add functionality to basic processing. For example SEC US-GAAP validation may have XBRL-US best practices checks added by a plug-in, but a user may want to validate with those extra checks disabled, which is done by disabling the corresponding plug-in.
- Reload: if developing a plugin, or changing its source code, one may wish to have the plug-in reloaded manually, with this button.
- Remove: unloads the plugin and removes its entry from the configuration of installed plugins.
All changes to plugin enablement and so forth are local to the memory of the plug-in manager, until its dialog is closed. Thus canceling will not save or effect operations, and likewise, changing a plug-in to disable it won’t change the saved plugin configuration information until the manager is closed (and not canceled).
Closing the plug-in manager dialog
When close is selected, plug-in changes are saved in the configuration (for subsequent GUI restarts and command line operation). If any plug-in change affected the GUI menus, the user is given an option to let Arelle reload itself (this operation doesn’t save any pending operations, so please save any work, such as table linkbase form edits, first.)
Canceling to exit the dialog will not save or effect any changes.
-
Categories
-
Articles
- October 2022
- March 2022
- February 2022
- January 2022
- March 2020
- September 2019
- July 2019
- June 2019
- February 2019
- June 2018
- November 2016
- March 2016
- January 2016
- December 2015
- November 2015
- October 2014
- March 2014
- October 2013
- May 2013
- March 2013
- January 2013
- November 2012
- August 2012
- April 2012
- February 2012
- January 2012
- December 2011
- July 2011
- June 2011
- May 2011
- March 2011
- February 2011
- November 2010
-
Meta