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This page describes how to use two advanced BrightAuthor features: custom autorun plugins and parser scripts. These instructions assume a certain level of familiarity with BrightScript. This is not a comprehensive guide to writing custom scripts for BrightAuthor; rather, it is meant to provide a general outline and best practices for writing those scripts.

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Plugins allow you to add script extensions to a standard presentation autorun. Plugins have two primary benefits over custom autoruns: They can be easily inserted into multiple presentations, including newer and older versions of the same presentation; and they are not dependant dependent on a certain autorun or firmware version, greatly reducing the complexity involved in updating custom BrightScript deployments.

To designate one or more custom plugins for a BrightAuthor presentation, navigate to File > Presentation Properties > Autorun. Click the Add Script Plugin button, give the plugin a name (which must be the same as the <plugin_name> described in the initialization function below), and click the Browse button to locate and select a .brs file to use as a plugin.

Plug-in scripts must include an initialization function in the form of <plugin_name>_Initialize(). This initialization function is passed three parameters:

• msgPort as As Object
• userVariables as As Object
• o as As Object: This is the .bsp associative array from the autorun. It is required for the initialization function to return an associative array.

To process events, the plugin script must provide a ProcessEvent function () function that is a member of the associative array returned by the initialization function described above. The ProcessEvent() function is given passed a single event object. The function then returns a Boolean indicating whether or not the autorun should continue processing the event object: The function will return True if it handles the event and the standard autorun should not continue processing the event.

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The following example code shows how to write a script that receives a Send Plugin Message Command from the autorun. This code listens for a message sent to the plugin named “Pizza” and then prints the message:

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The following example code shows how to write a script that sends a message string to trigger a Plugin Message event.

print "pizza_ProcessEvent - entry"
    print "type of m is ";type(m)
    print "type of event is ";type(event)

    if type(event) = "roTimer" then

        pluginMessageCmd = CreateObject("roAssociativeArray")
        pluginMessageCmd["EventType"] = "EVENT_PLUGIN_MESSAGE"
        pluginMessageCmd["PluginName"] = "Pizza"
        pluginMessageCmd["PluginMessage"] = "toppings"
        m.msgPort.PostMessage(pluginMessageCmd)
        return true

    endif

    return false

End Function

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You can use a script to parse non-MRSS feeds and provide the data in a format that can be used by Media RSS Feed states in BrightAuthor. To designate a parser for an MRSS feed, navigate to File > Presentation Properties > Data Feeds in BrightAuthor.

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