SimVascular Hello World Plugin

This is a simple example of an external plugin for SimVascular

Setup

There are two steps to start using the plugin:

• Build the plugin using CMake
• Set up environment variables so SimVascular can find and load the plugin

Building with cmake

from this directory:

mkdir build
cd build
ccmake ..
make

This will compile the plugin shared library into /build/lib/plugins

Note: during the cmake configuration you will have to turn on the variable ACCEPT_DOWNLOAD_EXTERNALS, this allows cmake to download the external libraries SimVascular uses in order to compile the plugin.

Note: On certain OSes you may need to add -fpermissive to CMAKE_CXX_FLAGS and CMAKE_C_FLAGS during the cmake configuration step.

Environment Setup

Note: on windows a ; (semicolon) separator is used instead of : (colon)

To determine what plugins to load, at runtime, SimVascular will read an environment variable named SV_CUSTOM_PLUGINS, which is a : separated list of plugin names. To load a plugin you will have to add its name to the SV_CUSTOM_PLUGINS variable.

The name of your plugin is the shared library filename without its extension and without lib. E.g. if the plugin file is called liborg_sv_gui_qt_hello.so the plugins name is org_sv_gui_qt_hello.

SimVascular will also need the directory locations of all plugins. To find these it reads SV_PLUGIN_PATH, which is a : separated list of absolute directory paths containing the plugin shared library binary files.

SV_CUSTOM_PLUGINS and SV_PLUGIN_PATH can be defined in your environment directly (e.g. by editing your .bashrc file). Alternatively, at runtime, SimVascular will look for a script named simvascular_custom_plugins.sh in the directory ~/.local/share/SimVascular/ on unix, or ~/Library/Application\ Support/SimVascular/ on MacOS, and execute it, so you can also define the environment variables there. If the script doesn't exist yet you can manually create it.

If this plugin was compiled in /home/SimVascular-Plugin-Example/build our simvascular_custom_plugins.sh file would contain

export SV_CUSTOM_PLUGINS=$SV_CUSTOM_PLUGINS:org_sv_gui_qt_hello

export SV_PLUGIN_PATH=$SV_PLUGIN_PATH:/home/SimVascular-Plugin-Example/build/lib/plugins

If setup correctly you should see a "brain" icon in the list of SimVascular plugins after launcing SimVascular. Additionally during startup, SimVascular will print all plugins to the console, along with their path, and you can use that information to see if your plugin is being loaded correctly.