Hi,

I've seen recent messages here about improvements the Lazarus IDE interface for 3rd party add-ons. I must admit, I did not follow it closely. Is Lazarus IDE also trying to be API compatible with Delphi's OTA (like its doing with VCL), or is that not a design goal?

Regards,
- Graeme -

A follow-up question. Is there any documentation/wiki on the IDE Interface API for Lazarus (trunk)?

I'm busy working my way through the wiki pages to see if I can find anything. I just found the "Extending the IDE" page.... but that begs the question... Is that information up to date, as the wiki is so often outdated.

ps:
Lazarus *really* needs documentation per Lazarus version.

I know Michael van Canneyt wrote some articles many years back (which was immensely useful in the past), but I'm assuming many things in Lazarus has changed since then. So there is probably better methods to use now?

Regards,
- Graeme -

It is not a design goal.
It is a nice to have.

Mattias

We are trying to keep the IDEIntf pretty stable and list incompatibilities in the release notes.
OTOH the IDE itself has no such guarantees, so don't access that code from packages.

Mattias

I doubt it, the IDEIntf is very stable ?

Code that worked years back, still works, I have a lot of extras installed that were developed a really long time ago, and they all still work.

Michael.

Michael Van Canneyt wrote

I doubt it, the IDEIntf is very stable ?

Very good to know. Thanks Michael and Mattias.

Regards,
- Graeme -

Graeme Geldenhuys wrote

I've seen recent messages here about improvements the Lazarus IDE interface for 3rd party add-ons. I must admit, I did not follow it closely. Is Lazarus IDE also trying to be API compatible with Delphi's OTA (like its doing with VCL), or is that not a design goal?

I think the existing API is quite stable but the interface has been extended. The messages you saw were about an API for IDE ToolButtons with dropdown lists or other special treatments.
It is a good and flexible API but we did not think of Delphi OTA when designing it. How is it done there? Should we be compatible?

Another issue is documentation. I am not even sure where this API should be documented. Unfortunately documentation is low in the ToDo list when adding badly missing features.
I promise to document it at some point but not yet.

Juha