Creating the Translation Provider Factory
This section explains how to create a translation provider factory. A factory lets applications like Trados Studio create translation provider instances from a specific URI.
Overview
The translation provider factory instantiates translation providers. It must implement the ITranslationProviderFactory interface, which defines three methods:
- SupportsTranslationProviderUri: Determines whether the factory supports the specified translation provider URI. See The Translation Provider URI Scheme.
- CreateTranslationProvider: Creates a new translation provider identified by the specified URI and loads previously serialized state information.
- GetTranslationProviderInfo: Provides a lightweight way to determine the translation method used by translation providers created by the factory without creating a translation provider instance.
Registering the Extension
To make the translation provider factory available to host applications such as Trados Studio, mark it with a TranslationProviderFactoryAttribute. This plug-in framework extension attribute is extracted into the plug-in manifest.
The Name, Description, and Icon values are informational only and are not used in Trados Studio at this time.
The Translation Provider URI Scheme
The host application determines which factory to use for a translation provider by calling SupportsTranslationProviderUri. For this reason, each translation provider implementation should define a unique URI protocol. The factory can then determine support by checking whether the specified URI matches that protocol. Trados Studio can sequence translation providers so users can perform lookups across all providers in the sequence. This sequence cannot contain duplicate translation providers. Two translation providers are duplicates if they have the same Uri and state (see SerializeState). If you want users to add multiple instances of your translation provider to the same sequence, for example with different settings, make sure those settings are serialized as part of the state.
Authentication
Most translation providers require authentication. For this reason, CreateTranslationProvider includes a credentialStore parameter. This ITranslationProviderCredentialStore object is passed by the host application and can be used by the factory to retrieve or store credentials. Credential management is the host application's responsibility. For example, Trados Studio stores credentials in a file on the user's machine, but does not send credentials in packages for security reasons.
The credential store is effectively a dictionary that maps URIs to credentials. The API makes no assumptions about credential format and represents credentials as a string. The translation provider implementation handles conversion to and from its chosen string representation.
By the time CreateTranslationProvider is called, the caller or host application should already have populated the credential store. Throw a TranslationProviderAuthenticationException if no suitable credentials are available for this translation provider. In Trados Studio, this prompts the user to provide credentials, after which CreateTranslationProvider is called again. Under no circumstances should CreateTranslationProvider attempt to show a logon user interface. For information on providing a custom logon user interface for your translation provider, see Creating the Translation Provider UI Extension.