Pdml2flow 5.0

pdml2flow version 5.0 was released. New key features are:

• Plugin interface version 2: cli integration
• Replaced pdml2xml and pdml2json with pdml2frame
• 98% test coverage
• Python 3.6 support

Upgrade using pip is as simple as:

$ sudo pip install --upgrade pdml2flow

Plugin Interface Version 2

Before 5.0 plugins were configure with environment variables. Now, plugins are loaded and configured from the command line. In order to support multiple output sink all the flow writing logic was moved into plugin as well. Using pdml2flow with the JSON output plugin:

$ pdml2flow +json '-h'

The argument after the plugin invocation is passed straight to the plugin. Which means that the -h from the example above is passed to the JSON plugin. To support this, the plugin interface was changed. Now __init__ will be passed all arguments (*args) from the command line. In this case [ '-h' ].

diff --git a/pdml2flow/plugin.py b/pdml2flow/plugin.py
index db016a3..06f7425 100644
--- a/pdml2flow/plugin.py
+++ b/pdml2flow/plugin.py
@@ -1,7 +1,20 @@
 # vim: set fenc=utf8 ts=4 sw=4 et :
 
-class Plugin1(object):
-    """Version 1 plugin interface."""
+class Plugin2(object): # pragma: no cover
+    """Version 2 plugin interface."""
+
+    @staticmethod
+    def help():
+        """Return a help string."""
+        pass
+
+    def __init__(self, *args):
+        """Called once during startup."""
+        pass
+
+    def __deinit__(self):
+        """Called once during shutdown."""
+        pass
 
     def flow_new(self, flow, frame):
         """Called every time a new flow is opened."""

This change alone is not the reason for the interface bump. The true interface break comes from a change in the flow class. Before 5.0 frames of the flow were accessible using a getter called get_frames(). This was replaced with a more pythonic getter frames. Example usage:

flow.frames['frame']['time_relative']['raw']

or as an alternative using a list:

flow.frames[['frame', 'time_relative', 'raw']]

Replaced pdml2xml and pdml2json with pdml2frame

Since all the output was moved into plugins, pdml2xml and pdml2json no longer made sense. This is why I replaced those tools with pml2frame which supports the same plugin interface as pdml2flow. This means pdml2xml becomes pml2frame +xml. And for pdml2json use pdml2frame +json instead.