WikiExporter

These are LionKimbro's notes on developing a wiki exporter.

Date: 2004-02-12
Inkscape version: 0.40
Target: Oddmuse

That is, a system so that you can load from and save to a wiki.

The wiki targetted by this exporter is Oddmuse. We have an upload script for it.

I imagine it should be possible to use the Wiki XML-RPC interfaces as well, in the future, though they are usually turned off.

odd_output.inx

This file goes in: /usr/share/inkscape/extensions

<inkscape-extension>
  <name>Oddwiki Output</name>
  <id>org.inkscape.output.odd</id>
  <dependency type="executable" location="extensions">svg2oddmuse.sh</dependency>
  <output>
     <extension>.odd</extension>
     <mimetype>image/x-svgz</mimetype>
     <filetypename>Oddmuse Wiki POST (*.odd)</filetypename>
     <filetypetooltip>Oddmuse Wiki proxy (SVG, PNG of Drawing)</filetypetooltip>
     <dataloss>FALSE</dataloss>
  </output>
  <script>
     <command reldir="extensions">svg2oddmuse.sh</command>
     <helper_extension>org.inkscape.output.svg.inkscape</helper_extension>
  </script>
</inkscape-extension>

What data am I receiving from Inkscape?

To see what you're getting from Inkscape, create the following script, and call it: svg2oddmuse.sh

#!/bin/bash
echo "hello, world" > /tmp/eraseme.txt
echo "invocation: $@"
echo
echo "$1:"
cat "$1"
echo "- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -"
env

It appears that no environment variables are being set. The first (and only) argument is the location of a file in /tmp that contains the Inkscape SVG data.

Now what?

The strategy is this:

• create a directory, representing the wiki
• place a file in the directory, "oddmuse.txt", representing necessary details about the wiki
• when the user saves a file to the directory (.odd extension,) do the following:
  • push the SVG to the wiki
  • render a PNG, and push the PNG to the wiki
  • perhaps append the name of the wikipage containing the SVG to a page on the wiki

We don't have command-line access (bash argument, environment variable) to the filename or directory it was saved in. But we CAN get this data from the Inkscape SVG.

The <svg> element has attributes:

• "sodipodi:docbase" -- path up to the save location
• "sodpodi:docname" -- filaname, including extension (".odd", in this case)

Inkscape Export process

• User hits "Save" in "Save As" dialog
• Inkscape writes a file with a random name to /tmp
• Inkscape calls export bash script, with /tmp file as only argument
• Whatever bash outputs to /dev/stdout, Inkscape records to the file chosen by the user.