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Developer Center

Getting Started

If you are interested in developing a plugin for Saber, please take the time to read and understand all of the documentation on this page.


Development Process

Development Caveats

  • You should research and fully understand the tools you have access to when developing a plugin for Saber.
    • Saber.Core has many application-wide features that you can utilize when building your Saber vendor plugin.
    • Query is an MSSQL/Dapper library that allows you to access stored procedures within Saber's database and is part of the Saber.Core NuGet package.
    • You can use HTML & Mustache to generate content for your plugin, or build Mustache Components and Special Variables that users can use when writing HTML for their Saber web pages.
    • Saber uses various JavaScript libraries on the client-side for making AJAX calls, displaying popup modals, and enhancing Saber's Editor UI.
    • Saber uses Tapestry as a CSS grid & UI framework for Saber's Editor. You will need to learn how to use Tapestry if you wish to create plugins that modify or enhance Saber's Editor.
    • Saber uses the Datasilk Core MVC NuGet package to render web pages instead of using Microsoft's MVC framework, and is included in the Saber.Core NuGet package.
  • When designing plugins that render content on the user's web pages (using IVendorHtmlComponents), understand that the user will be using vanilla CSS & JavaScript, so make sure to define any CSS styles that your plugin will be using without using any existing CSS/LESS/SASS frameworks (such as Bootstrap) and do not use any JavaScript frameworks, including jQuery, Angular, React, and Vue.

A diagram depicting Saber's core technologies and how plugins integrate into Saber's framework


Publish a Release of your Plugin

To publish your plugin, run the command ./publish.bat. When the command completes, you can find your release .7z zip file under /bin/Publish/. This is the file that you should share with the public for download. It will contain two folders, win-x64 and linux-x64, for Windows operating systems and supported Linux distributions. For more information about which Linux distributions are supported, visit Microsoft's RID catalog.

Also, before publishing, you should consider the following steps: