Panel settings

The panel settings API allows you to define configurable settings for your extension, and render them in a style consistent with the Foxglove UI.

The PanelExtensionContext exposes methods for the business logic of your custom panel – including one to define your settings interface and to configure its values. Check out @foxglove/studio for full type descriptions on all possible configuration values.

updatePanelSettingsEditor

updatePanelSettingsEditor: (settings: Readonly<SettingsTree>) => void

Invoke the updatePanelSettingsEditor on your panel's PanelExtensionContext instance to define or update its settings.

const panelSettings: SettingsTree = {
  nodes: { ... },
  actionHandler: (action: SettingsTreeAction) { ... }
};

context.updatePanelSettingsEditor(panelSettings);

SettingsTree

The settings argument must be a valid SettingsTree and include 2 mandatory properties – nodes and actionHandler:

• nodes - Hierarchical structure where each node can contain input fields, display fields, or even other nodes
• actionHandler - Function that is invoked when the user interacts with the settings UI; contains logic to process the interactions and update the panel or settings tree

It can also include the following optional properties:

• enableFilter – Whether the settings should show the filter control
• focusedPath – Node to scroll to (transient one-time effect)

The example tree below has a title text input field inside a General section along with an actionHandler to respond to updates for the title field.

const panelSettings: SettingsTree = {
  nodes: {
    general: {
      label: "General",
      fields: {
        title: "{
          label: "Title",
          input: "string",
          // `panelTitle` refers to a value in your extension panel's config
          value: panelTitle,
        },
      },
    },
  },
  actionHandler: (action: SettingsTreeAction) {
    switch (action.action) {
      case "perform-node-action":
        // Handle user-defined actions for nodes in the settings tree
        break;
      case "update":
        if (action.payload.path[0] === "general" && action.payload.path[1] === "title") {
          // Read action.payload.value for the new panel title value
          panelTitle = action.payload.value;

          // Update your panel's state accordingly
        }
        break;
    }
  },
}

context.updatePanelSettingsEditor(panelSettings);

SettingsTreeAction

A SettingsTreeAction describes how the settings UI should update when a user interacts with its fields.

Each SettingsTreeAction has a payload with a path to the settings field to update (e.g. ["general", "title"]).

The update action corresponds to a user setting a new value for a field (e.g. "My new title").

Special node properties

There are two special node properties, label and visibility. The value you specify for label will control the label displayed in the settings editor. If you set the renamable node property to true, the user can edit the node label – you will receive a SettingsTreeAction of update with a path ending in label.

In addition, if you specify a boolean value for visibility of the node then the settings editor will provide a button to toggle the visibility of the node and you will receive an update action with visibility as the final element in the path.

For an example of how to use these special properties, check out the panel settings example extension.

Input types

In addition to the string input type in the example above, the panel API provides a wide array of types for your extension panel input fields.

Each input type has different properties that you can configure:

• autocomplete
• boolean
• rgb
• rgba
• gradient
• messagepath
• select
• string
• toggle
• vec3
• vec2