Where to start to develop a plugin

Elexis "inherits" the Plug-In architecture of eclipse. Thus, eclipse's huge documentation on Plug-In development is always a good place to find answers.

To provide a convenient starting point, the Plugin elexis-befunde is deliberately simple designed and well documented. You might want to use this to start learning about plugin development for elexis. In this article, we'll describe that plugin detailed.

The following files belong to the plugin elexis-befunde:

• Plugin.xml. This file is an eclipse requirement and contains all informations that are necessary to actually put the plugin together with the rest of the programm (and with all other plugins).
• META-INF/manifest.mf: THe standard OSGi-Bundle. Is created autimatically
• ch.elexis.befunde.BefundePerspektive: This files defines a perspective for the plugin.(Which is not really necessary in that case, but we want toshow, how to do it)
  
•  ch.elexis.befunde.Messwert: Definition of a data type. here we create a subclass of PersistentObject and a table in the elexis database to store our values.
• ch.elexis.befunde.MesswertFactory: A class that can create "Messwert" -objects and thus gives the elexis-kernel the possibility to create such objects in a controlled way..
  
• ch.elexis.befunde.BefundePrefs: This defines a preference pagethat is included seamlessly with the main preferences of elexis.
• ch.elexis.befunde.MesswertView: A View to display ourdata