Desktop Plugins

These are optional plugins that can be included in an embedder to access OS functionality.

How to use this code

In the long term plugins would be managed via pub, as they are with mobile Flutter plugins. For now, however, they are designed to be included directly from this repository.

Flutter

Add local package references for the plugins you want to use to your pubspec.yaml. For example:

dependencies:
  ...
  color_panel:
    path: relative/path/to/plugins/color_panel

Then import it in your dart code as you would any other package:

import 'package:color_panel/color_panel.dart';

macOS

Build the Xcode project under the macos diretory for each plugin you want to use, then link the resulting framework in your project.

When you set up your FLEViewController, before calling launchEngine..., call -registerWithRegistrar: on each plugin you want to use. For instance:

  [FLEFileChooserPlugin registerWithRegistrar:
      [myFlutterViewController registrarForPlugin:"FLEFileChooserPlugin"]];

Linux

Run ninja -C out at the root of the repository to build all plugins, then link the libraries for the plugins you want into your application. As with the library build, out/ and out/include/ will contain all the files you need.

After creating your Flutter window controller, call your plugin's registrar method. For instance:

  plugins_color_panel::ColorPanelPlugin::RegisterWithRegistrar(
      my_flutter_controller.GetRegistrarForPlugin(
          "plugins_color_panel::ColorPanelPlugin"));

Example Application

See the example application under each platform's directory in the example directory to see an example of including optional plugins on that platform.

The Flutter application under example/ shows examples of using optional plugins on the Dart side.

Writing your own plugins

You can easily create local packages following the model of plugins here to use in your own projects. In particular, the color_panel plugin has examples of typical platform builds for plugins.

If you think they would be generally useful, feel free to submit a pull request and they could potentially be folded into this repository. In the future, as noted above, desktop plugins would be managed using a model like mobile plugins where that wouldn't be necessary.

Caveats

Currently only JSONMethodCodec is supported for Windows/Linux plugins. See google#67