orderly_plugin_register: Register an orderly plugin

In orderly: Lightweight Reproducible Reporting

Register an orderly plugin

Description

Create an orderly plugin. A plugin is typically defined by a package and is used to extend orderly by enabling new functionality, declared in your orderly configuration (orderly_config.json) and your orderly file (⁠<name>.R⁠), and affecting the running of reports primarily by creating new objects in the report environment. This system is discussed in more detail in vignette("plugins").

Usage

orderly_plugin_register(
  name,
  config,
  serialise = NULL,
  deserialise = NULL,
  cleanup = NULL,
  schema = NULL
)

Arguments

name	The name of the plugin, typically the package name
config	A function to read, check and process the configuration section in the orderly configuration. This function will be passed the deserialised data from the plugin's section of ⁠orderly_config.json, and the full path to that file. As the order of loading of plugins is not defined, each plugin must standalone and should not try and interact with other plugins at load. It should return a processed copy of the configuration data, to be passed in as the second argument to ⁠read'.
serialise	A function to serialise any metadata added by the plugin's functions to the outpack metadata. It will be passed a list of all entries pushed in via orderly_plugin_add_metadata(); this is a named list with names corresponding to the field argument to orderly_plugin_add_metadata and each list element being an unnamed list with values corresponding to data. If NULL, then no serialisation is done, and no metadata from your plugin will be added.
deserialise	A function to deserialise any metadata serialised by the serialise function. This is intended to help deal with issues disambiguating unserialising objects from json (scalars vs arrays of length 1, data.frames vs lists-of-lists etc), and will make your plugin nicer to work with orderly_metadata_extract(). This function will be given a single argument data which is the data from jsonlite::fromJSON(..., simplifyVector = FALSE) and you should apply any required simplifications yourself, returning a modified copy of the argument.
cleanup	Optionally, a function to clean up any state that your plugin uses. You can call orderly_plugin_context from within this function and access anything you need from that. If not given, then no cleanup is done.
schema	Optionally a path, within the package, to a schema for the metadata created by this plugin; you should omit the .json extension. So if your file contains in its sources the file inst/plugin/myschema.json you would pass plugin/myschema. See vignette("plugins") for details.

Value

Nothing, this function is called for its side effect of registering a plugin.

Examples

# The example code from vignette("plugins") is available in the package
fs::dir_tree(system.file("examples/example.db", package = "orderly"))

# See orderly_plugin_register in context here:
orderly_example_show("R/plugin.R", example = "example.db")

orderly documentation built on Jan. 24, 2026, 1:07 a.m.