Trac Component Architecture

As the heart of Trac, trac.core​ implements a minimal component kernel that allows components to easily extend each others functionality. It provides a "meta-plugin-API": every component can easily offer its own plugin API by declaring "extension points".

What is a Component?

For our purposes, a component is an object that provides a certain type of service within the context of the application. There is at most one instance of any component: components are singletons. That implies that a component does not map to an entity of the application's object model; instead, components represent functional subsystems.

Components can declare "extension points" that other components can “plug in” to. This allows one component to enhance the functionality of the component it extends, without the extended component even knowing that the extending component exists. All that is needed is that the original component exposes – and uses – one or more extension points.

A component can extend any number of other components and still offer its own extension points. This allows a plugin to itself offer a plugin API (i.e. extension point). This feature is the basis for a plugin-based architecture.

The actual functionality and APIs are defined by individual components. The component kernel provides the “magic glue” to hook the different subsystems together – without them necessarily knowing about each other.

Public classes

trac.core.ComponentManager

Manages component life cycle, instantiating registered components on demand

trac.core.Component

Abstract base class for components.

trac.core.ExtensionPoint

Declares an extension point on a component that other components can plug in to.

trac.core.Interface

Every extension point specifies the contract that extenders must conform to via an Interface subclass.

Declaring a component

The simplest possible component is an empty class derived from trac.core.Component:

from trac.core import *

class MyComponent(Component):
    pass

In the context of a component manager, this component can already be used:

    comp_mgr = ComponentManager()
    my_comp = MyComponent(comp_mgr)

Remember that components follow the singleton pattern. There is only one active instance of any component per component manager. The component constructor is "magic" in that it checks with the component manager whether there's already an active instance before allocating a new instance. If the component was already instantiated, the existing instance is returned:

    my_comp1 = MyComponent(comp_mgr)
    my_comp2 = MyComponent(comp_mgr)
    assert id(my_comp1) == id(my_comp2)

If a component needs to initialize data members, it can override the __init__ method. But because the component manager needs to be able to instantiate the component on demand, __init__ must not require any extra parameters, including the reference to the component manager passed into the constructor:

    from trac.core import *

    class MyComponent(Component):
        def __init__(self):
            self.data = {}

    comp_mgr = ComponentManager()
    my_comp = MyComponent(comp_mgr)

Direct Component sub-classes also do not need to worry about invoking the base classes __init__ method (which is empty).

Declaring an extension point

The component above doesn't actually do anything. Making an object a component only makes it act as a singleton in the scope of a component manager, which isn't that exciting in itself.

The real value of components becomes clearer when the facilities for extensions are used. As a simple example, the following component provides an extension point that lets other components listen to changes to the data it manages (in this case a list of to-do items) – following the widely known observable pattern:

    from trac.core import *
    
    class ITodoObserver(Interface):
        def todo_added(name, description):
            """Called when a to-do item is added."""

    class TodoList(Component):
        observers = ExtensionPoint(ITodoObserver)

        def __init__(self):
            self.todos = {}

        def add(self, name, description):
            assert not name in self.todos, 'To-do already in list'
            self.todos[name] = description
            for observer in self.observers:
                observer.todo_added(name, description)

Here, the TodoList class declares an extension point called observers with the interface ITodoObserver. The interface defines the contract that extending components need to conform to.

The TodoList component notifies the observers inside the add() method by iterating over self.observers and calling the todo_added() method for each. The Component class performs some magic to enable that: Conceptually, it intercepts access to the extension point attribute and finds all registered components that declare to extend the extension point. For each of those components, it gets the instance from the component manager, potentially activating it if it is getting accessed for the first time.

Plugging in to an extension point

Now that we have an extendable component, let's add another component that extends it:

    class TodoPrinter(Component):
        implements(ITodoObserver)

        def todo_added(self, name, description):
            print 'TODO:', name
            print '     ', description

This class implements the ITodoObserver interface declared above, and simply prints every new to-do item to the console. By declaring to implement the interface, it transparently registers itself as an extension of the TodoList class.

Note that you don't actually derive the component from the interface it implements. That is because conformance to an interface is orthogonal to inheritance; and because Python doesn't have static typing, there's no need to explicitly mark the component as implementing an interface.

You can specify multiple extension point interfaces to extend with the implements method by simply passing them as additional arguments.

Putting it together

Now that we've declared both a component exposing an extension point, and another component extending that extension point, let's use the to-do list example to see what happens:

    comp_mgr = ComponentManager()
    todo_list = TodoList(comp_mgr)

    todo_list.add('Make coffee',
                  'Really need to make some coffee')
    todo_list.add('Bug triage',
                  'Double-check that all known issues were addressed')

Running this script will produce the following output:

    TODO: Make coffee
          Really need to make some coffee
    TODO: Bug triage
          Double-check that all known issues were addressed

This output obviously comes from the TodoPrinter. Note however that the code snippet above doesn't even mention that class. All that is needed to have it participating in the action is to declare the class. (That implies that an extending class needs to be imported by a python script to be registered. The aspect of loading components is however separate from the extension mechanism itself.)

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See also: TracDev