Slicer3:SkeletonGenerator
Contents
Introduction
The Skeleton Generator is a simple program to generate template codes for 3D Slicer module and help developers to get started on their development. A source code generated by the Skeleton Generator can immediately be compiled and executed as a 3D Slicer module. The developers can create their own modules by just modifying the codes.
Getting Started
Requirement
The Skeleton Generator is written in Tcl. You need to have a Tcl interpreter to run the program on you computer. The program generates a Slicer3 Module C++ code, which can be compiled on Windows/Linux/Mac OS X.
Get the program
The program is available in the NA-MIC SandBox repository. You can obtain the source code by using Subversion. In case of Linux and Mac OS X, simply type following command in the terminal:
svn co http://svn.na-mic.org/NAMICSandBox/trunk/IGTLoadableModules/SkeletonGenerator SkeletonGenerator
How to use it
You must have a Slicer source directory. We suppose that the Slicer source directory is <working directory>/Slicer3 and Skeleton Generator in <working directory>/SkeletonGenrator. If you want to create a new module named "NewModule"
$ cd <working directory>/Slicer3/Module $ <working directory>/SkeltonGenerator/generate.tcl --name=NewModule
Skeleton Generator creates a directory named "NewModule" and generates template codes there.
$ cd NewModule $ ls CMakeLists.txt vtkNewModuleGUI.h NewModule.txt vtkNewModuleLogic.cxx vtkNewModuleConfigure.h.in vtkNewModuleLogic.h vtkNewModuleGUI.cxx vtkNewModuleWin32Header.h
Compile the module
First you need to edit CMakeLists.txt in Slicer3 modules directory (<working directory>/Slicer3/Modules/CMakeLists.txt to add the new module directory. In subdirs () section, where all module names are listed, add
NewModule
Then run make in Slicer3 module build directory (<working directory>/Slicer3-build/Modules). On Linux and Mac OS X,
$ cd <working directory>/Slicer3-build/Modules $ make
For Windows, open the project file in Slicer3-build/Modules from Visual Studio, and build the project.
The make / Visual Studio will call CMake to generate appropriate Makefile/project file in <working directory>/Slicer3-build/Modules/NewModules. Once you confirm that the building process finishes without errors, launch Slicer and check the module selector.
Future work
- Provide several module styles e.g. wizard-based GUI (The program already has a mechanism to choose a style from different template codes, but only a simple template is provided currently.)
- Note: relies on 'sed' so may not work on windows.
