Advice to profiler authors

To profile using metric plugin libraries, ensure your profiler is setup to:

• Implement all the functions specified in the Metric plugin API.
• Parse the metric definitions XML files from an established location.
• Load the shared libraries as described in the <source> elements of those XML files.
• When each metric library is loaded, call the allinea_plugin_initialise() function. When each library is unloaded, call its allinea_plugin_cleanup() function.
• To obtain values, call the metric getter methods (as declared in the metric definitions XML defined in the metric plugin library).
• Normalize, with respect to time, the values obtained from any metric configured with a divideBySampleTime attribute set to true in their XML definition (see <metric> in Metric Definition File).
• Store, process, and display the values obtained from the metric plugin libraries, as appropriate.