Plugin Registry

This 'singleton' component is mostly internal to the library. It loads all of the Plug-ins for TREs, image compression and decompression, and for DES segments. The plugin manager houses all of the plugins that were loaded at runtime, along with the providing the hooks for accessing them.

This object is created on first use. If created, it is destroyed at exit time. The registry contains three sets of information as 'dispatch tables.' These tables are hashes, with a key representing the name of the plugin (known as the plugin identifier), along with a handle to the plugin itself. During reading, the Reader object uses this component to load known TREs into the hash table.

A number of API methods exist in this component, allowing developers to access the object directly. They are documented on the Code Snippets page, and in the Doxygen.