Installing Plugins to Domino Designer

This guide explains about installing plugins to Domino Designer

Enabling Plugin Installation

If you have never installed plugins to Designer before, then you may need to enable plugin installation in Domino Designer Preferences.

Go to File → Preferences → Domino Designer and ensure that the Enable Eclipse plug-in install checkbox is set

DesignerEnablePluginInstall

Update Sites Explained

The plugins that you are installing will exist in a format that is called an Update Site. Whilst you may find lots of informoation online about the newer p2 repository update site format, this information is not relevant to us for Domino Designer.

Domino Designer still uses an older format for update sites which basically consist of:

  • a site.xml file which provides a list of the features contained in the update site

  • a features directory which contains all the features

  • a plugins directory which contains all the plugins

In truth, you do not really install plugins, you install features. Although all the brains are inside the plugins, features are a way to group some plugins together, so that if you want a certain feature it knows which plugins are needed to be installed. So you ask for a feature to be installed, and then it knows which plugins to install based on that.

The concept of an update site is that once Domino Designer knows about an update site, it can keep checking that site for future updates.

This can be useful if you register your own NSF Update Sites, which you can then use as a basis to update Domino Designer from there. Once your NSF is register you can simply check for updates.

However a more common scenario is that you download an update site in the form of a zip file and install from that file just one time. In this case you usually add these Archive Update Site's each time you need to install one.

Installing from a New Update Site

To Install from a new update site, choose File → Application → Install..

DesignerFileApplicationsInstall

Add the update site that you want to install from

use Add Zip/Jar Location if it is a zipped update site use Add Folder location if it is not zipped

Then click finish, the update manager will do some thinking.

It will then show you some 'features' that can be installed, choose the one you want to install and click next

Then accept the license agreements and then finish the wizard

It will do some more thinking, and then tell you

'The system is trying to install a plugin do you want to?' and you MUST change the option to say 'Install this plug-in' Then click ok

You will then need to restart Domino Designer

Installing from an existing Update site

If you already have an update site register you should be able to follow the same procedure above without added a new update site. Just let it check existing update sites.