KTp/Components/Chat Window/Plugin API Draft

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KDE Telepathy  Mostly written in C++  Mature, well-established codebase  Well-commented source code  Small development team  Decreasing Y-O-Y development activity  2 active contributors Commit Activity Timeline: more at  Updated Feb 22, 2024

Making an API to create plugins for the chat window. These should be able to handle the following usecases:

• Translator plugin - when messages are sent or received, it will translate them before they are displayed (or actually sent)
• Image Embed plugin - when a URL of an image is received, it will display the image under the text
• Grammar correction - a plugin that replaces "wont" with "won't" on messages to be sent
• Youtube embed - embeds a youtube video in a chat

The stakeholders (components) are as follows:

• UI - telepathy-kde-text-ui and chat-widget etc.
• Plugin Manager
• Plugin
• Core (Telepathy)

<I'll upload the diagram for how they interact later>

The interactions between the components:

• Plugin Manager and Plugin
  • Process Message
  • Return Message
  • Initialize
  • Loading
  • Destroy
  • Send-Message //still not sure about this
• Plugin Manager and Ui
  • Display Message
  • Display Final Message
  • Send New Message //to be processed BEFORE being sent
• Plugin Manager and Core
  • New Message Received
  • Send New Message

It will consist of the following classes

• Interface Class : ReceivingPlugin
  • virtual methods:
    • ProcessReceivedMessage(Message message);
  • methods:
    • PreProcessReceivedMessage(Message); maybe have method like this, which PluginManager will call, that will check that that message hasn't already been processed before calling ProcessReceivedMessage().

• Interface Class : SendingPlugin
• Plugin Manager - Every client that wants to use the plugin system will have a single, global, static instance of this.
  • signal: displayMessage(bool final);
  • slot: processAndSendNewMessage(QString message);
  • slot: processReceivedMessage(Tp::Message message);
  • QList<SendingPlugin>
  • QList<ReceivingPlugin>