Deployment of UModel IDE Plug-Ins
On a development PC, the COM registration takes place when you build the plug-in with Visual Studio; no manual registration is required under normal circumstances. If you intend to deploy a UModel IDE plug-in to a target client system, the target PC must have the following prerequisites:
•UModel Professional or Enterprise edition
•If the plug-in is written in .NET, the corresponding Microsoft .NET Framework.
On a deployment PC, the plug-in can be registered either manually or by the setup. For an example of a Visual Studio setup project, see the "Set Styles" Sample.
To register a UModel IDE plug-in manually:
1.On the Tools menu of UModel, click Customize.
2.Click the Plug-Ins tab.
3.Click Add Plug-In and browse for the .dll file of the plug-in.
You can check whether a UModel plug-in is registered by running regedit.exe at the command line. UModel maintains the following registry key for all registered plug-ins:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Altova\UModel\PlugIns
All values of this key are treated as references to registered plug-ins and must conform to the following format:
Value name: | ProgID of the plug-in |
Value type: | must be REG_SZ |
Value data: | CLSID of the component |
Every time UModel starts, the values of the "PlugIns" key are scanned, and the registered plug-ins are loaded. If you experience problems, check if the CLSID of your plug-in is correctly registered in the "PlugIns" key. If this is not the case, the name of your plug-in DLL was probably not sufficiently unique. Use a different name in this case.
| Note: | When deploying your UModel IDE plug-in on .NET framework versions prior to 2.0, the plug-in .dll file must either be installed in the same directory as UModel.exe or signed with a strong name key and registered into the global assembly cache (GAC). |
Should you need to perform various assembly-related tasks manually, be aware of the following tools included in the .NET Framework SDK:
•Assembly Registration Tool (regasm.exe). Use this to perform manual registration or de-registration of COM assemblies. For example, to maually register the UModelPlugLib.dll, use:
regasm.exe UModelPlugInLib.dll /codebase |
•Strong Name Tool (sn.exe). This can be optionally used to sign your assembly with a strong key, for example:
sn.exe -k MyKeyFile.snk |
The key can also be generated from Visual Studio, see Sign the Plug-In With a Strong Name (Optional).
•Global Assembly Cache Tool (gacutil.exe). Use this to add or remove an assembly from the Global Assembly Cache (GAC). For example, to add MyPlugin.dll to GAC, use:
gacutil.exe /i MyPlugin.dll |
For more information about tools included in the .NET Framework, refer to the Microsoft documentation https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/framework/tools/.