Howto write an antony registry

Owned by mlinkwitz
Last updated: Apr 20, 2023
4 min read

General

Antony’s modulesystem allows you to write a registry which will be loaded by the antony client and/or antonyHub. The registry is needed to let you hook into our software.

This documentation is valid for antony versions 2.22.82 and above!

To integrate into the client you need to provide an assembly with is accessibly from .net Framework 462 (which the desktop client uses). To provide UIs in special you have to provide them via .Net462. We are sorry for this, but we’ll look forward to provide .net core >= 3.1 for this some day.

From a top level perspective we need create a registry to embed our classes into the di-container, antony provides. To do so we need to write a custom registry for it. To do so, we need to register as a module developer and define our module.

We provide an example project here: https://bitbucket.org/diegroupware/antony.demo.trainee.desktop/src/master/?search_id=ceb40d4f-44b2-41a7-b340-c7ae4c46727a

Tl;Dr;

ExtensionInterfaces

Antony provides interfaces which are used to detect and load your registry. This interfaces comes within an easy to handle nuget package. This package doesnt have any other dependencies but .netstandard 2.0. Therefore you should be able to use this in nearly every project. You find this Project on :

The Version of this NuGet Package will correlate with the Version of antony itselfe. A 2.21.130 of antony.Groupware.ExtensionInterfaces will be shipped with the 2.21.130 of antony. We’ll make sure, to minimize breaking changes within this interfaces. Therefore the module written for a specific version will also work on a further version. As you can read here might work with another version of this interfaces and your dependencies at runtime.

Registry

To register you need to specify the assembly attribute AntonyModule to your assembly. Within this attribute you need to point to a class, containing the registry. Every registry need to be part of a module for licencing. Every module needs to be licencened - even if its free. To identify your module you need to provide a ModuleKey.

At the moment you cannot register a module by yourself. Please let us know, if you want to write a module by mailing us at info(at).die-groupware.de

The Register method needs to be annotated with the AntonyServiceRegistry attribute to be loaded. The signature of this method is provided in the snipped below. In this method you can finally register within antony’s DI-Container.

We use AutoFac as the DI-Container ()

[assembly: AntonyModule(typeof(ZoomModuleAntonyRegistry), ModuleKey = "de.die_groupware.zoom")] namespace antony.Groupware.AddinX.Zoom { public class ZoomModuleAntonyRegistry { [AntonyServiceRegistry()] public void Register(IServiceCollection services) { // ... } } }

Let antony search

After we defined the registry we also need to tell antony where to find your assembly. We’ll do this by using the windows registry. You need to add a value into the following key

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\SCOM\antony\modules\<application>\<your_module_key>\

You need to replace the values within the bracets with appropriate values as shown within the screenshot below. The application might be

  • AntonyGroupware: To integrate within Antonys Administator or Groupware-Client

  • AntonyHubClient: To integrate within the antonyHub to add configuraton dialogs for a custom service.

You need to provide the path to the file of your assembly. antony checks all available modules at startup, compares with the available licences and calls your registry. Congratulations, you are in

Specific Implementation for specific versions

The ExtensionInterfaces will change over time, as we add or extends the possibility to integrate into antony. Therefore we might add more interfaces for theses extension points. You as an module developer can use these interfaces to extend your module too. As you update the ExtensionInterfaces you are able to do so.

As we described in we the assemblies of antony itself are preferred to load, including the ExtensionInterfaces.Therefore you will get a TypeNotFoundException, if you try to load your band new module within an old antony installation. To get around this, we provide the possibility to declare a minimal version of antony your registry runs on.

So if you create a new version with new interfaces of your module you need to create a new registry defining the version you want to add. In this case the old registry works as usual, and the new registry registered the new interfaces and implementations within the DI-container.

Conclusion

It is quite simple to provide a module which is loaded by antony. You only need to specify a registry and let antony know where to search for it. You should be able to use the classes within nearly every project.

So open your favorite IDE, create a Project and go for it. You can do it right