Dell EMC DataIQ Developer Guide

Copy CCM contents into hoststorage

This method shows you how to convert a ClarityNow! custom context menu (CCM) into DataIQ. This usually means copying the contents of the main ccm.control file, plus a script or two, into the new hoststorage folder and making a few modifications.

1. Copy the contents of the original plugin directory into this hoststorage folder, as shown below.
   
2. Rename the file: ccm.control to ca.control, and make appropriate changes to the plugin.
   
3. Add the files: app.py and a startup.sh from the into the project hoststorage folder. Plugins in DataIQ are implemented as Flask servers in Python which the rest of DataIQ uses to communicate with the plugin code. These files can be found in the DataIQ Developer Guide Sample Files at https://github.com/dell/dataiq-plugin-example. app.py configures this server, and startup.sh controls the runtime environment of the plugin.

   By the time you have finished the conversion and built your plugin, the project directory may look similar to the following example. In this sample project, there are additional files in the hoststorage directory, including a build script and distribution directory for packaged plugin archives.

   
4. If your plugin will be running in an environment which cannot access the PyPi Package Repository, modify these lines to install any runtime dependencies from a packaged directory with the plugin, or use a private Pip repository that it will have access to. If these steps don't apply, move on to the packaging and distribution steps.

   The startup.sh script is run every time the plugin is started and is primarily used to set environment variables and pull runtime dependencies. Notice that the default startup.sh uses a pip command to install Python 2 dependencies from your requirements.txt over the internet. A copy of the relevant lines are below:

   if [ -f "/hoststorage/requirements.txt" ]; then
       pip install -r "/hoststorage/requirements.txt"
   fi