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Extensions and plugins

AvNav offers various ways to extend and modify its functionality and appearance. In addition to the options for configuring display properties directly in the interface, customizing the displays (widgets) via layouts, connections, and other server parameters, the following options are available:

  1. Customizing the appearance via CSS. AvNav is a web application and uses CSS for its appearance. Various options are built in to adapt the rules used for this:

    1. Custom CSS for all displays in a user.css file
    2. CSS for a specific layout - directly in the layout
    3. CSS in plugins

  2. Extending the display functionality via JavaScript code. This can be used, for example, to add a new formatter to convert a value for display in a widget. In addition, functionality can be extended in other areas (with varying levels of difficulty):

  3. Creating your own data displays (or extending existing ones) for the navigation page and the dashboards (text-based and graphical)
  4. Creating displays directly on the map (map widgets)
  5. Integrating additional map types: Here, for example, different types of vector maps can be integrated
  6. Format functions for displaying map or overlay information
  7. Custom dialogs
  8. Access to online resources
  9. ...

This code can be introduced in two ways:

1. A [*user.mjs*](userjs.md) file in the user directory
2. JavaScript code in [plugins](plugins.md#jscode)
  1. Server extensions in Python. This function is only available for the Linux and Windows versions. The Python code must be part of a plugin.

All these possibilities require a certain amount of know-how or familiarization with the respective languages used. However, simple adjustments can often be achieved through discussion in the community or with AI assistance. Only a good text editor is required to create or edit the extensions; no special tools are necessary. For many functions, the editor integrated into AvNav is sufficient.

Note

When creating extensions, you will usually create or edit text in various files. AvNav has no built-in functions to back up this data (or a history of it). Therefore, this data should be kept in another location, e.g., using the available download functions. This protects against loss in the event that the entire AvNav system should fail.

Documentation

There is detailed documentation available on this topic:

CSS

JavaScript

Plugins