54.11 How can I provide information about a plug-in?

When you create a plug-in, you can supply the following arguments to the registration command:

author

A string specifying the author's name.

version

A string specifying the version of the plug-in.

description

A string specifying a brief description of the plug-in.

helpUrl

A string specifying a path to a URL that provides information about your plug-in.

For a full description of the arguments to the kernel and GUI registration commands, see Chapter 37, Plug-in registration commands,” of the ABAQUS Scripting Reference Manual.

The helpUrl argument can be any valid web browser URL. In most cases the URL will point to an HTML file, but the URL can also point to a plain text file or to an external web site. If you provide a help file with your plug-in that will be referenced by the helpUrl argument, you should avoid hard-coding directory names by constructing the path to the help file using the techniques shown in previous examples. The following example of myUtils_plugin.py shows how you can provide information about the plug-in and construct the relative path to the helpUrl argument:

from abaqusGui import getAFXApp
toolset = getAFXApp().getAFXMainWindow().getPluginToolset()

import os
helpUrl = os.path.join(os.getcwd(), 'bridgeHelp.htm')

toolset.registerKernelMenuButton(
    buttonText='Print Current Viewport',
    moduleName='myUtils', functionName='printCurrentVp()',
    author='ABAQUS, Inc.', version='1.0'
    description='Print current viewport to a PNG file', helpUrl=helpUrl)