Plug-Ins for the Engine

Plug-Ins for the Engine (Using the Engine) New in Version 2025.1

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Based on the CAD6interface, you can also create plug-ins that are used within the CAD6engine. While such a plug-in is 99% identical in code to a plug-in intended for use by CAD6, you need to consider the following:

•	The CAD6engine will only try to load plug-ins whose names begin with mkcad6engine_. CAD6 on the other hand will ignore all plug-ins whose names contain mkcad6engine_.

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The plug-in's file name still has to end with an underscore _ (Unicode 95), followed by the extension .dll. All three types of plug-ins have to reside in the application's main path (i.e. in the same directory as the application and the mkcad6engine.dll). When starting, the CAD6engine will search for all files matching mkcad6engine_*_.dll and will try to install those files as plug-ins or filters (see Plug-In Style Guide).

•	Make sure that the plug-in marks the MKI_APPTYPE_ENGINE application type as supported when initialising the m_nAppType member of MKI_PLUGIN_ID in MKI_PlugInInit.

•	If you're using a *.lib file to easily locate the interface DLL and all of its members, make sure to use mkcad6engine.lib instead of mki_lib6.lib.

To simplify developing for both targets at once (CAD6 and CAD6engine), all accompanying language DLLs, PNG icon and image files, CHM help files, and so on should usually by identical both in contents and file names.