@rocket.chat/apps-engine

Rocket.Chat Apps Engine

The engine which manages and controls everything....more details coming soon.

Thoughts While Working (for docs)

• Apps which don't provide a valid uuid4 id will be assigned one, but this is not recommended and your App should provide an id
• The language strings are only done on the clients (TAPi18next.addResourceBundle(lang, projectName, translations);)
• The implementer of this should restrict the server setting access and environmental variables. Idea is to allow the implementer to have a default set of restricted ones while letting the admin/owner of the server to restrict it even further or lift the restriction on some more. Simple interface with settings and checkbox to allow/disallow them. :thinking:

To Think About?

• Will we support es6? Since we currently check extends keyword and can check implements via determing what methods exist
• Using https://www.npmjs.com/package/jsonc-parser for the json parsing?

Development environment with Rocket.Chat

When developing new functionalities, you need to integrate the local version of the Apps-Engine with your local version of Rocket.Chat.

First of all, make sure you've compiled the changes you've made to the Apps-Engine, since that is what Rocket.Chat will execute:

npm run compile

Now, you need to setup a local Rocket.Chat server, so head to the project's README for instructions on getting started (if you haven't already). Make sure to actually clone the repo, since you will probably need to add some code to it in order to make your new functionality work.

After that, cd into Rocket.Chat folder and run:

meteor npm install PATH_TO_APPS_ENGINE

Where PATH_TO_APPS_ENGINE is the path to the Apps-Engine repo you've cloned.

That's it! Now when you start Rocket.Chat with the meteor command, it will use your local Apps-Engine instead of the one on NPM :)

Whenever you make changes to the engine, run npm run compile again - meteor will take care of restarting the server due to the changes.

Note: Sometimes, when you update the Apps-Engine code and compile it while Rocket.Chat is running, you might run on errors similar to these:

Unable to resolve some modules:

  "@rocket.chat/apps-engine/definition/AppStatus" in
/Users/dev/rocket.chat/Rocket.Chat/app/apps/client/admin/helpers.js (web.browser)

If you notice problems related to these missing modules, consider running:

  meteor npm install --save @rocket.chat/apps-engine

Simply restart the meteor process and it should be fixed.

Implementer Needs to Implement:

• src/server/storage/AppStorage
• src/server/storage/AppLogStorage
• src/server/bridges/*

Testing Framework:

Makes great usage of TypeScript and decorators: https://github.com/alsatian-test/alsatian/wiki

• To run the tests do: npm run unit-tests
• To generate the coverage information: npm run check-coverage
• To view the coverage: npm run view-coverage

Rocket.Chat Apps TypeScript Definitions

Handlers

Handlers are essentially "listeners" for different events, except there are various ways to handle an event. When something happens there is pre and post handlers. The set of pre handlers happens before the event is finalized. The set of post handlers happens after the event is finalized. With that said, the rule of thumb is that if you are going to modify, extend, or change the data backing the event then that should be done in the pre handlers. If you are simply wanting to listen for when something happens and not modify anything, then the post is the way to go.

The order in which they happen is:

• PreEventPrevent
• PreEventExtend
• PreEventModify
• PostEvent

Here is an explanation of what each of them means:

• Prevent: This is ran to determine whether the event should be prevented or not.
• Extend: This is ran to allow extending the data without being destructive of the data (adding an attachment to a message for example).
• Modify: This is ran and allows for destructive changes to the data (change any and everything).
• PostEvent: Is mostly for simple listening and no changes can be made to the data.

Generating/Updating Documentation

To update or generate the documentation, please commit your changes first and then in a second commit provide the updated documentation.