Maybe in the future, we might not only want to edit text or source code files. Perhaps you want to implement syntactic auto-formatting yourself and totally supercede the default text editor component ? Or, for a particular file type, you want something else than a simple text area ? You know what ? WE can !
Among other possibilities here, we can imagine:
- Hexadecimal editor for binary files
- Edition in a tree view for XML and HTML files
To write a document factory plugin, import DocumentFactory and use the DocumentFactory annotation:
from DocumentFactory import DocumentFactory
@DocumentFactory
def binaryDocumentFactory(file=None, name=None, data=None, *args, **kwargs):
...A serie of arguments are passed to your factory function. All of them may be None. Most popular are:
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file: a pathlib.Path object representing the file to open
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name: the name of the tab; most often the file name without path, or things like "untitled 1"
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data: the data read from the file, as bytes; in general given only when the file doesn't exist or is unknown, as when reading from clipboard, standard input or network for example
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IF you can create a document with the arguments passed, return a Document object. You must extend the Document class, and, generally, pass all arguments to your constructor, and then to the constructor of Document in your init method.
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IF you don't recognize any document with the parameters given, return None. The next document factory will be called, and finally the default one.