Using custom gemsets in our plugin

As Redmine is a Ruby on Rails application, all external dependencies are managed using Bundler. This utility greatly simplifies dependency management, but by default only allows a single Gemfile to be evaluated when a bundle is being installed.

Although not provided by the default plugin generator, if our plugin will require external gemsets, we can add a Gemfile to our plugin root, which will be automatically merged by Redmine whenever Bundler commands are executed or dependencies are evaluated.

For example, we can create Gemfile in our plugin root directory as follows:

source 'https://rubygems.org'

gem 'redmine_acts_as_taggable_on', '~> 1.0'
gem 'ya2yaml'

When the Bundler installation command is run from the root of our Redmine installation, our plugin's custom gems will be included and installed:

$ bundle install
Using rake (10.1.1)
...
Using redmine_acts_as_taggable_on (1.0.0)
Using rmagick (2.13.2)
Using sqlite3 (1.3.8)
Using ya2yaml (0.31)
Using yard (0.8.7.3)
Your bundle is complete!

Generating models and controllers

The generators introduced previously include variants to generate a plugin's models and controllers.

One of the primary features of our knowledgebase plugin is the ability to manage categories. In order to implement this feature, we'll first have to generate the necessary model, migration, and controller code.

Redmine's plugin model generator parameters are the plugin name, the name of the model, then a list of attributes, and their data types:

$ rails generate redmine_plugin_model redmine_knowledgebase Category title:string description:text
 create plugins/redmine_knowledgebase/app/models/category.rb
 create plugins/redmine_knowledgebase/test/unit/category_test.rb
 create plugins/redmine_knowledgebase/db/migrate/001_create_categories.rb

As we've provided some field details in our generator, the generated migration will be populated accordingly. The same process can be followed to generate the controller that coincides with our model.

Redmine's plugin controller generator follows the same pattern as the plugin model generator, but doesn't require field details:

$ rails generate redmine_plugin_controller redmine_knowledgebase Category
 create plugins/redmine_knowledgebase/app/controllers/category_controller.rb
 create plugins/redmine_knowledgebase/app/helpers/category_helper.rb
 create plugins/redmine_knowledgebase/test/functional/category_controller_test.rb

Redmine's plugin views cannot be directly generated, but as they follow the standard Rails layout convention of extending ActionController and ActionView (http://guides.rubyonrails.org/layouts_and_rendering.html), we can quickly add view templates and partials to our plugin by placing the necessary files under /path/to/redmine/plugins/redmine_knowledgebase/app/views.

The preceding examples were left intact as they reflect what the actual Redmine plugin generators produce.