The Plug-in Manifest
All Visual Studio projects that are based on the templates that come with the SDL Trados Studio SDK are configured to automatically create a plug-in package (i.e. an .sdlplugin* file) when the project is built. (See also Setting up the Project). One essential piece of information required in order to do this is the plug-in package manifest, which is defined in the file **pluginpackage.manifest.xml, which is part of the project template. If this manifest is missing, the project package cannot be built (see also Building the Plug-in).
Below you see what the manifest of our sample plug-in looks like:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<PluginPackage xmlns="http://www.sdl.com/Plugins/PluginPackage/1.0">
<PlugInName>Sdl.Sdk.LanguagePlatform.Samples.ListProvider</PlugInName>
<Version>1.0</Version>
<Description>Delimited List Translation Provider</Description>
<Author>SDK Sample Provider</Author>
<RequiredProduct name="SDLTradosStudio" minversion="10.0" />
</PluginPackage>
The manifest contains the following information:
- PlugInName: indicates the friendly name of the plugin. This string be different from the name of the plug-in that is defined in PluginResources.resx. The reason for this is that a plug-in package can - in theory - contain multiple plug-ins, which need to be distinguished.
- Version: the version of the plug-in package. This information used to detect any package updates upon start-up of SDL Trados Studio, and is therefore important.
- Description: descriptive information of the plug-in package.
- Author: the name of the plug-in developer.
- RequiredProduct: this string indicates which product version is required to run the given plug-in. The information that you indicate here must include the minimum version, and can optionally include a maximum version.