extending-peripheral-inspector.md

Extending Peripheral Inspector

It is possible to extend the Peripheral Inspector with new file extension providers in your VSCode extension. This method will provide reading new file formats and load the peripherals information into the Peripheral Inspector.

Building your VSCode Extension to extend Peripheral Inspector

This is a guide about how you can register new peripheral providers to Peripheral Inspector in your VSCode extension. Please refer to VSCode Extension API for more information about developing VSCode extensions.

Adding Peripheral Inspector to your VSCode extension

You need to install eclipse-cdt-cloud/vscode-peripheral-inspector to access the types information. You can use npm or yarn with the following arguments described below:

Using with npm:

npm install github:eclipse-cdt-cloud/vscode-peripheral-inspector

Using with yarn:

yarn add github:eclipse-cdt-cloud/vscode-peripheral-inspector

Developing your extension

To provide the peripherals information to Peripheral Inspector on debug session time, you need register your command which is going to construct the peripherals information. The command will receive DebugSession object as an input parameter and expects to return array of type PeripheralOptions[].

You can find the example command implementation below:

import { ExtensionContext } from 'vscode';
import type * as api from "peripheral-inspector/api";


class MyExtensionProvider implements api.IPeripheralsProvider {
    public async getPeripherals (data: string, options: api.IGetPeripheralsArguments): Promise<api.PeripheralOptions[]> {
        // Load your peripherals data
        const peripherals: api.PeripheralOptions[] = ...
        return peripherals;
    }
}

export async function activate(context: ExtensionContext) {
    ...
    // Get the eclipse-cdt.peripheral-inspector extension
    const peripheralInspectorExtention = extensions.getExtension<api.IPeripheralInspectorAPI>('eclipse-cdt.peripheral-inspector');

    // Check if the eclipse-cdt.peripheral-inspector extension is installed
    if (peripheralInspectorExtention) {
        const peripheralInspectorAPI = await peripheralInspectorExtention.activate();

        // Invoke registerPeripheralsProvider method in eclipse-cdt.peripheral-inspector extension api
        // Register 'MyExtensionProvider' for files *.myext
        peripheralInspectorAPI.registerPeripheralsProvider('myext', new MyExtensionProvider());
    }
    ...
}

For further information about the api definitions, review the Peripheral Inspector API Definitions.

Modifying your package.json

In package.json of your VSCode extension project, you need to define the dependency between Peripheral Inspector and your extension.

You need to define Peripheral Inspector in the extensionDependencies as shown below:

{
  ...
  "extensionDependencies": [
    "eclipse-cdt.peripheral-inspector"
  ],
  ...
}