AttachLinkPlugin

Syntax Rules

%ATTACHMENT{ name="filename" topic="TopicName" web="Webname" label="sometimes_text_sometimes_magic" }%

This apparently trivial plugin turns out to be quite useful. Besides syntactic sugar, it actually makes previously hard things easier!

Until now, referencing an attachment in a TWiki topic has required escape to HTML, with lots of ugly TWiki variables like %PUBURLPATH% and %ATTACHURL% to do the simplest things. AttachLinkPlugin fixes that!

Further, it makes it easy to have clickable images - for example, thumbnails that when clicked, expand to a full-size picture.

Here are the syntax details:

• name - The filename that you upload. Just the name, no path. The name= is optional, but the quotes are not.
• topic - the topic that manages the attachment. The default is the current topic, so you can usually omit this.
• web - the web that contains the topic that manages the attachment. The default is the current web, so again, you can usually omit this.
• label - the thing that you want visible to represent the link. This can be text - or another object. The default is the filename, so you can omit it too. See the examples for details.

Examples

%ATTACHMENT{ "foo.jpg" }% Create a link to foo.jpg in the current topic, which will look like: foo.jpg underlined. (Can WYSIWYG underline?)

%ATTACHMENT{ "foo.jpg" label="The foomobile afloat" }% gives you a hyperlink to the same file, like this: The foomobile afloat

%ATTACHMENT{ "foo.jpg" label="%IMG{ "foo_thumb.jpg" align="left" width="40" class="none" }%" }% will display foo_thumb.jpg inline. You can click on the image, and if you do, foo.jpg will display.

So you essentially have the power of [[TWiki.WikiWord][PrettyText]] links, for images and other attachments. And anything else that will take an HTML anchor tag.

A rather surprising result for less than 10 executable statements of perl. If %ATT% is not in use (do we have a registry of variables?), I would be receptive to adding the line to add it as an alias for %ATTACHMENT% - I already have 10s of thousands of instances of %ATTACHMENT%

Enjoy it as much as I do.

Plugin Settings

Plugin settings are stored as preferences variables. To reference a plugin setting write %<plugin>_<setting>%, i.e. %ATTACHLINKPLUGIN_SHORTDESCRIPTION%

• One line description, is shown in the TextFormattingRules topic:
  • Set SHORTDESCRIPTION = Painless links to attachments

• There are no other settings for this plugin.

Plugin Installation Instructions

Note: You do not need to install anything on the browser to use this plugin. The following instructions are for the administrator who installs the plugin on the TWiki server.

• Download the ZIP file from the Plugin Home (see below)
• Unzip AttachLinkPlugin.zip in your twiki installation directory. Content:

  File:	Description:
  data/TWiki/AttachLinkPlugin.txt	Plugin topic
  lib/TWiki/Plugins/AttachLinkPlugin.pm	Plugin Perl module

• Configure the Plugin:
  • Run the configure script to enable the plugin
  • Change the plugin settings as needed
• Test if the installation was successful:
  • enter samples here

Plugin Info

Related Topics: TWikiPlugins, DeveloperDocumentationCategory, AdminDocumentationCategory, TWikiPreferences