Introduction

The X-Plane Remote Access (XPLRA) plugin provides a gateway to external applications to access some internals of X-Plane. This document describes the plugin and its usage. It is assumed that the reader is somewhat familiar with the X-Plane plugin SDK. The plugin currently works on Linux and Windows, but porting to Mac should be easy. If you would volunteer, let me know! :)

The XPLRA plugin allows the extern applications to perform the following:

Get and set the values of datarefs either individually or in batch. Batches can also be pre-registered in case the same set of datarefs is to be queried or modified several times. This avoids having to send and resolve the dataref names every time.
Query the versions of X-Plane, XPLM (the plugin manager) and XPLRA.
Show a message in a window for the pilot for a specified amount of time.
Register and then monitor hotkeys.

Currently the plugin can be accessed locally, i.e. from the same computer that runs X-Plane, but extending it with TCP/IP-based or network access would not be difficult. While client libraries are provided for C, C++ and Python, the communication protocol between clients and the plugin is open and is described in this documentation. So you can write your own client library, if you wish.