Getting started

Welcome to the Joa Plugin API Documentation!

Intro

Joa plugins are written in C#, but you should be able to follow this tutorial with a basic understanding of any programming language.

Setup environment

• Download and install the .NET 7 SDK
• Install the Joa plugin template with:

dotnet new install THE NUGET PACKAGE

• Create a new project based on the template with:

dotnet new joaplugin -o "MyFirstPlugin"

• Build the project with

cd ./MyFirstPlugin
dotnet build

• You can see, that this created a new Folder: PluginBuild. You need to configure Joa, so that it knows where it should look for your plugin. For this, go to the Joa settings and add the path.

• You should now be able to test out your plugin. Use Joa to search for MyFirstPlugin. You should see a search result that was provided by your plugin.

Understanding the template

Open the project in your favourite Editor (Visual Studio Code, Rider, Visual Studio)

The template generated a C# file which contains a class that implement the IPlugin interface. Every plugin must contain exactly one of these.

You can also see that the class has a constructor which take an IJoaLogger as an argument. Plugins can use the IJoaLogger to log stuff to the log file. The log file can be opened by searching for Joa log file in Joa (Developer mode needs to be enabled). Plugins can make use of Dependency Injection (see here for more detail).

The method ConfigurePlugin(IPluginBuilder builder) comes from the IPlugin interface and is the entry point for plugins. You can use the IPluginBuilder to configure your plugin.

In the template we add a global search result which just prints something to the log when executed.