Creating a plugin with MinGW

[Seppo Raisanen]

Hi

I am trying to create a plugin with MinGW compiler. Currently I have got so far that N++ does load my plugin, but plugin context menu does not contain any text I try to set there and I don't have any idea how to proceed.

Relevant parts of the code below, full sources and compiled dll available here:
http://zepi.kapsi.fi/TestPlugin.zip

const int nbFunc = 2;
FuncItem funcItem[nbFunc];

BOOL APIENTRY DllMain( HANDLE hModule,
                       DWORD  reasonForCall,
                       LPVOID lpReserved )
    {
    switch (reasonForCall)
        {
        case DLL_PROCESS_ATTACH:
            funcItem[0]._pFunc = Func1;
            funcItem[1]._pFunc = Func2;
            strcpy(funcItem[0]._itemName, "Test 1");
            strcpy(funcItem[1]._itemName, "Test 2");
            funcItem[0]._pShKey = NULL;
            funcItem[1]._pShKey = NULL;
            break;
        }
    return TRUE;
    }

extern "C" __declspec(dllexport) FuncItem * getFuncsArray(int *nbF)
    {
    *nbF = nbFunc;
    return funcItem;
    }

It seems that I do set all of the required fields and provide them when asked, but "Plugins->TestPlugin" menu is empty (actually it contains few lines, no text)

In compiling I use following command:
g++ -c -o TestPlugin.o TestPlugin.cpp -DBUILD_DLL

Linking DLL for N++ in MinGW seems to be tricky, currently I use following command:
g++ -o TestPlugin.dll -Wl -shared -lshlwapi TestPlugin.o
This seems to be okay for N++, because it won't complain about non-multithreaded DLL (will do that, if I use the "-export-dynamic" argument that example suggest)

I think there might be something wrong when linking... Any ideas?

[Seppo Raisanen]

I tried redefining that APIENTRY, didn't help.
But I got around this problem just by initializing that funcItems when I declared it.

So managed to create small plugin then: alt-up changes to previous file and alt-down to next one :)

[Seppo Raisanen]

Well, found the reason...
DllMain does not get called.

If I have code like this:
BOOL APIENTRY DllMain( HANDLE hModule,
                       DWORD  reasonForCall,
                       LPVOID lpReserved )
    {
    ::MessageBox(NULL, "DllMain", "", MB_OK);
    }

I'll never see that message box.

Any ideas why this happens?

[Harry]

I had this with MinGW and TextFX, I believe APIENTRY isn't correctly defined. You may want to manually define it, for example something like
#define APIENTRY __stdcall
though that's for the VS compiler, not sure how MinGW likes that.

Also, you could try to initialize funcItems inside getFuncsArray()