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  • Hi everybody,

    i saw in different places in the ui the word filepath.

    How can I use this to call a plugin from my usb stick, and where can I find that stick? it is drive 2 if I am correct, but no idea what the syntax is.

    thanks a lot and happy programming all.

  • thanks Riri, i know about that one.

    I want to protect my intellectual property. So run the plugins from a usb stick, and when I walk away they are not in the desk if I take my usb stick with me, or they live somewhere on a PU for others to save from a backup station behind the stage.

  • The File Path represents a path relative to lib_plugin folder the where your plugin components reside. In my plugins I used to have them all in separate paths but I backed away from that.

    If you look at the system_test.xml you can see how it's structured.

    As far as I can tell when you import the plugin into the desk from a removable disk its loaded in memory so it can run, when you unplug the stick it's still in memory so it will continue to run until you restart the desk. When you restart the console and the plugin does not exist in the internal drive you will notice the plugin is still in the pool but the components all have a size of 0 Bytes. If you scroll through the logs you will also notice it says it can't load the plugin.

    Both the path and the file name must be relative (they can't start with a `/`). However, I just tested something and found to my surprise it works, though this is most likely a bug! and doing it is probably not advised!

    Anyway, another way to represent a relative path is to use an Up Traversal (../) basically just means the previous path to where we are now.

    I tested making an XML file in the lib_plugins folder on my USB stick that pointed directly to a lua file directly at the root of my USB sick and lo and behold it loaded it, when I unplugged the USB stick it still ran until I restarted then it stopped running, but when I plugged the stick back in and restarted the console and the plugin loaded!

    So normally plugins are loaded on the desk from `/home/ma/MALightingTechnology/actual/shared/resource/lib_plugins` and the first USB stick is usually /media/sda1 (I say usually because it can move to sdb1, c1, d1 and so on) so in the xml file instead of entering usb.lua I entered ../../../../../../../media/sda1/usb.lua and it worked. The actual number of `../` actually doesn't matter as long as it's more then the number of paths deep you are from the root.

    This has a ton of caveats, largest among them that it will probably be "fixed" in future versions the other issue is if the plugin is in memory, nothing stops someone from exporting it to the internal or external USB drives. heck it might even cause a crash.

    Anyway, interesting nonetheless.

    At the time my desk was seeing mu Stick as sdb1

  • awesome, thanks for all your great help Hoss. I saw that you can turn off the option of [installed] so hope that keeps it in the memory and safe away from people who spend their Corona days different than we are.

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