Sentry 3.0 Documentation

Sentry 3.0 Documentation

Last Revised: June 2008

Creating a Sentry Plugin

Overview

The implementation of Sentry plugins was kept very simple so that creating Sentry plugins would be accessible to those of all programming or scripting skill levels.

Requirements

A Sentry plugin is simply an executable file (EXE) that can handle 2 different command line arguments. They are:

SENTRY_START_PLUGIN - Passed when Sentry is loading the plugin when it is initially displayed. Sentry will pass four additional command line parameters after 'SENTRY_START_PLUGIN' which correspond with the top coordinate, left coordinate, height and width, respectively. In HTML layout, it will also pass any additional command line options that you give it.

SENTRY_STOP_PLUGIN - Passed when Sentry is shutting down and the plugin is to be closed. This will be called one time for every instance of each plugin.

SENTRY_CONFIGURE - Passed when a user clicks the "Configure" button in the Sentry Plugin Manager. This should open a settings/configuration window for the plugin.

sentry plugins must be placed in the Plugins folder under where Sentry was installed.

Using a Sentry Plugin

In a HTML Layout...
Add a HTML comment followed by SENTRYPLUGIN. Then include the plugin filename, top, left, width and height parameters. Example:

<!--SENTRYPLUGIN PluginName 10 10 100 100 -->

In an INI Layout...
Add a section called "[Plugin]" with the left, top, width, height and filename parameters. Example:

[Plugin]
left=10
top=10
width=100
height=100
filename=PluginName

For more help creating a Sentry plugin, see the included example source code.