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Customizing Oxygen XML Editor (Overview)

Radu Coravu
Read time: 4 minute(s)

Let's assume you just bought Oxygen and want to customize it in order to better suit your team's workflow or to add support for your custom XML vocabulary. I will attempt to provide a set of use cases along with indications and useful links about what customization should be done in order to cover each use case:

Add support for editing a specific XML vocabulary

This kind of support usually should include:
  • New file templates.
  • Validate opened XML documents according to a custom schema.
  • Provide custom CSS to be used in the Author visual editing mode.
  • Provide custom toolbar, menu, and contextual menu actions to be used in the Author visual editing mode.
Such support is done using a document type/framework configuration: The Oxygen SDK (Part 2: Frameworks).

Customize the existing support for a specific XML vocabulary

Oxygen comes with pre-configured framework configurations for the most commonly used XML standards such as DITA, Docbook, TEI, or XHTML. You may want to customize the existing configuration for one of these vocabularies and share the customization with others. Such customizations may include:All of these customizations can be done by extending the existing framework configuration and then sharing the extension: Document Type Extension Sharing.

Provide custom settings

You may want to provide all members of the team with a fixed set of options: Sharing Application Settings.

Modify the application appearance or behavior using plugins

Oxygen plugins can be used to:
  • Contribute custom views and toolbars for the entire application.
  • Filter out existing views or toolbar actions.
  • Contribute a fixed set of options/settings to the application.
  • Register various listeners and be notified when a document is opened, closed, saved, and so on.
  • Use the existing API to make changes to the opened documents.
A more detailed overview of Oxygen plugins can be found here: The Oxygen SDK (Part 1: Plugins).

The most popular plugin extension is the Workspace Access plugin extension: https://www.oxygenxml.com/doc/ug-editor/topics/workspace-access-plugin.html. This extension is notified when the application starts and can contribute custom views, custom main menu items, custom main toolbar actions, or add listeners for various document-related changes.

There is also a JavaScript-based workspace access plugin extension that can use JavaScript to call our Java API: https://www.oxygenxml.com/doc/ug-editor/topics/workspace-access-plugin-js.html.

A set of sample plugins built with the JavaScript-based extension can be found here: https://github.com/oxygenxml/wsaccess-javascript-sample-plugins.

Our Maven-based SDK can be used to develop both plugins and framework Java customizations: https://www.oxygenxml.com/oxygen_sdk_maven.html.