Dev-Insider: Creating plugins with the Smartstore Visual Studio Extension

Author: Michael Herzog

Creating plugins for Smartstore has not been easy so far. This is changing now!

If you wanted to create a plugin up to version 3.2.2, the best way to do this was to copy an existing plugin, change the system name, controller name, views folder, and the naming of the objects contained within. Before that you also had to think about which plugin comes closest to the requirements you wanted to implement. It took quite some time to rename all relevant parts of the plugin. If you didn't do this often, it was also quite error-prone, because you might not have gotten all relevant places during the renaming. With the VisualStudio extension for Smartstore plugins all of this is no longer necessary.

Now you simply Add a New Project:

Choose the Smartstore Plugin Template and select the plugins folder of your Smartstore repository as the location of your new project. Now a dialog appears where you can select all the basic functionallity which you will need for your plugin.

Each of these options adds either corresponding code blocks or complete files with basic implementations of the desired functions to the project.

By clicking on the OK button, an executable plugin with the basic implementation as per the best practice for Smartstore plugins is created and added to the VS Solution.

In addition, a lot of helpful texts are placed as comments all over the source code. In short: This extension is a must-have for every Smartstore plugin developer.

You can obtain the Smartstore VS extension in the Visual Studio Marketplace.