8. Working with templates

Some plugins will be written to provide general functionality such as importing and exporting networks to a certain data format. Others will be written to work specifically with another software, which defines its network in a specific way.

On example of this might be a GAMS model, which uses specific node & link types, each with their own attributes individual to that model. In this case, a template can be provided to ensure that the network in hydra will always be compatible with this plugin.

A template defines node types and link types, including their name and the attributes they posess. It also defines colours and even images for nodes and links which the UI uses to display the network appropriately.

More details on templates can be found in Libraries and templates

The template XSD can be found here

A simple example of a template can be found here