About Warehouse Modules¶
The Kohana framework provides useful support for extensibility via the concept of modules, which allow the provision of additional models, views and controllers as well as the overriding of existing code from the main application. Indicia’s warehouse extends this idea by allowing modules to hook into various bits of core functionality. For example, Indicia allows a module to provide additional items to add to the main menu or new tabs for an existing page.
In addition to the application and system folders, Kohana supports a modules folder in the root of the installation folder which allows optional extra code files to be provided. Each module is held within a single folder inside the modules folder and provides a specific extension to core functionality. Modules typically declare additional models, views and controllers but can also declare other types of files, such as helpers used to perform spatial reference notation translations. Within the module folder, the path structure is the same as for core files within the application folder, so for example a module called specimens would declare controller classes in the folder modules/specimens/controllers, view code in modules/specimens/views and model classes in modules/specimens/models.
Note
The warehouse uses [http://semver.org/ Semantic Versioning] and there is a single version number which applies to the whole warehouse repository including the core code and modules. Therefore when releasing scripts for modules your version folder name must reflect the next version appropriate to the whole warehouse. If your module needs its own versioning then it should be in a separate repository.
The module controllers provide public methods and therefore additional URLs available within the warehouse, such as the URL paths which support the web services or installation procedures. However, although the modules folder can be used to create URL paths for separate functionality within the warehouse, there is a need to allow these URL paths to be accessed from the existing core warehouse screens. For example you might want to add a URL path to the main menu, or to add a tab to an existing edit screen. Furthermore if you use a module to declare additional database entities, you need to be able to declare how those entities relate to the existing entities in the model. Although your module’s model classes can declare the other models that they relate to, you cannot simply edit the core model to declare the inverse relationship since a module cannot depend on changes to the core code. Indicia includes a method of defining modules which act as plugins, hooking their functionality into the existing Warehouse in a seamless way. Currently the plugin architecture supports the following integration functionality:
modification of the main menu, e.g. to add a new page
the insertion of a new tab onto an existing view page
declare additional data entities that can be exposed via the data services
declare how new data entities are related to other entities.
