The Plug-in Bar
PReS Workflow offers a constantly increasing number of plugins, while always allowing third party plugins to be installed and set up to be used by PReS Workflow. The PReS Workflow Plug-in Bar lists all plugins available in PReS Workflow, and is divided into categories, which users can customize at will.
Most of the PReS plugins are installed by default, but other plugins may be added. Because the plugins are always expected to execute some sort of task, they are always referred to, in this documentation, as tasks, except in the specific case of importing a new plugin or customizing the Plug-in Bar.
Categories
The default categories list plugins according to what type of task they achieve. When first starting your PReS Workflow program, the following categories are used:
- Inputs; see Input tasks.
- Actions; see Action tasks.
- Data splitters; see Data splitters.
- Process logic; see Process logic tasks.
- Connectors; see Connector tasks.
- PlanetPress Capture; see PlanetPress Capture.
- Metadata related; see Metadata tasks.
- OL Connect Send; see OL Connect Send.
- OL Connect; see OL Connect tasks.
- Document Management; see Document Management tasks.
- Outputs; see Output tasks.
An Uncategorized category is dynamically created if your PReS Workflow finds any plugin that would not be part of the existing Plug-in Bar. User-defined plugins and third party application plugins fall into such a category.
Settings and customization
The Plug-in Bar can be customized according to your needs and the plugins you most frequently used.
You can use the horizontal dark blue bar separating the plugin area and the list of categories to change how many plugin categories are displayed as the full-width bar with the title, and how much are displayed as icon only. Move the bar up to display more full-width categories, or down to display them more as icons.
Furthermore, the Plug-in Bar can be customized using the popup indicator control (
). Customizing the Plug-in Bar is mostly used for third party or legacy plugins.
Using the contextual menu displayed by the popup indicator, you can:
- Insert, delete and rename custom categories.
- Move categories up or down.
- Import plugins, such as connectors, third party or legacy plugins.
- Move plugins from one custom category to another (that you cannot move default plugins from the default categories, you can only copy them)
- Copy plugins from one custom category to another by holding the CTRL key.
- Delete plugins from any custom category by using the Delete key. Note that custom plugins cannot be deleted this way. They will reappear after closing and opening the Workflow tool. For information on removal of custom plugins see Deleting a custom plugin.
- Revert to the default Plug-in Bar by selecting Reset to default. Custom plugins will remain as installed.
Importing a plugin
- Click on the popup control ().
- Click on Import Plugin.
- Browse to the location of the plugin DLL file or PPK file.
- Select the desired file type: .DLL or .PPK.
- Select the file and click on Open.
Plugins downloaded from the Resource Center will be placed in the appropriate category in the Plug-In Bar. The M-Files plugins, for example, will appear in the Document Management category.
Third-party plugins appear in the Uncategorized category.
Deleting a custom plugin
To permanently delete a custom plugin from the Plug-In Bar, you have to manually delete the DLL file from the following location: C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Objectif Lune\PlanetPress Workflow 8\Plugins.
Note that the name of the DLL file doesn't always match the name given to the custom plugin in the Workflow tool.