Plugins in milkman can extend various functionality. For this, an explanation of how a request is structured is necessary first.

Getting Started

A sample plugin was created that shows how to add an Aspect Tab to a Request.

if you want to setup a new project, an exemplary pom can be found here.

Marketplace registration

if you want your plugin to show up in the milkman marketplace, you need to add a topic (aka tag) to your repository milkman-plugins and a descriptor file milkman-plugin.json at the root which looks like this:

{
  "plugins": [
    {
      "author": "your name",
      "name": "your plugin id",
      "artifact": "the filename of the according artifact in your releases",
      "description": "some description"
    }
  ]
}

Data Model

The core of milkman is very abstract and is only intended to organize workspaces, which contain environments and collections of requests. A request is of a specific type and might contain some basic data. In the case of an HttpRequest, this might be the URL and the Method.

A request can also contain several RequestAspects which describe the request object further. In our example, this might be headers or the body of a request, but can also contain totally unrelated and auxiliary attributes.

All Aspects and the container gets serialized using Jackson and stored in a local Database.

Extension Points

Milkman uses SPI for extension. You just have to provide an implementation to one of the Extension Points below and move your packaged jar into the /plugin folder to have milkman pick up your plugin.

RequestAspectsPlugin

A request aspect can add aspects to either a request- or response container as well as according editors (providing the Tab to edit this specific aspect).

ContentTypePlugin

A content type plugin is used to format and highlight content based on a mime-type.

RequestTypePlugin

A plugin providing a request type such as HttpRequest, or SQL request or whatever you can think of. This plugin has to provide a small editor for basic attributes of the request as well.

ImporterPlugin

a plugin that imports things into the current workspace, such as collections, requests, environments.

OptionPageProvider

a plugin to provide a UI for editing options of a "logical" plugin. The OptionPageBuilder can be used to create common ui. On startup, changed options will be loaded from database.

UI Theme Plugin

provides an application-theme css and a syntax-theme css for styling.

Workspace Synchronizer Plugin

provides a mechanism to synchronize the workspace with some external mechanism

Request Export Plugin

extension point for adding export methods to a request-type.

Collection Export Plugin

extension point for adding export methods to a collection.

Persistence

All requests and RequestAspects (not response-aspects) will be stored in database and serialized using jackson. So you have to make sure that your classes properly serialize/deserialize.

Common Components

Some common components are provided by milkman to make development of plugins easier:

• TableEditor: a table that might or might not be editable. used for editing headers or environments or such.
• ContentEditor: a content editor that supports highlighting and formatting
• Dialogs: some common dialogs, such as credentialsInput or StringInput.

Testing

milkman uses TestFX for testing. A sample test can be seen in the notes plugin.

Gotchas

JavaFX uses a lot of weak references. That means, if you don't keep references to e.g. bindings or controllers even (if they are not referred to by e.g. FXML-onActions), they get garbage-collected and the bindings simply don't work. You can use setUserData in some cases to have a strong reference of the UI element to e.g. the controller, so they both get garbage-collected at the same time.