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Linking packages

Often time you will want to link to a package to Cornerstone3D, this might be to develop a feature, to debug a bug or for other reasons.

For instance, you find a bug in the rendering of the color images in cornerstone3D, digging deeper into the code you can find you need to debug inside cornerstone-wado-image-loader as the RGB images are decoded there. In order to do so, you need to link a local development version of 'cornerstone-wado-image-loader' to the cornerstone3D package, and put your debugger in the cornerstone-wado-image-loader source code.

Also, sometimes you may want to link the external packages to include libraries into your build that are not direct dependencies but are dynamically loaded. See the externals/README.md file for details.

There are various ways to link to a package. The most common way is to use yarn link. In the following examples, we assume we want to link the cornerstone-wado-image-loader package to our cornerstone3D package.

// inside cornerstone-wado-image-loader

yarn link

// inside cornerstone3D (at the root - not the packages)

yarn link cornerstone-wado-image-loader

However, this is not enough. We need to tell the cornerstone-wado-image-loader to build so that your changes to the source code are reflected/used in Cornerstone3D. For cornerstone-wado-image-loader to build, you can run yarn build. However, it will take a while to build the package. cornerstone-wado-image-loader comes with various webpack configurations, you can use/run the yarn webpack:dynamic:watch at the root of cornerstone-wado-image-loader to force the reflected changes to be built again which is faster than yarn build. and it also watches for changes to the source code and rebuilds the package.

Tips​

  1. yarn link is actually a symlink between packages. If your linking is not working, check out the node_modules in the Cornerstone3D directory to see if the symlink has been created (the updated source code - not the dist - is available in the node_modules).

  2. If your debugger is not hitting, you might want to change the mode setting in the webpack to be development instead of production. This ensures, minification is not applied to the source code.

  3. Use a more verbose source map for debugging. You can read more here