Working with plugins

At a glance

• The atom icon (⚛) next to a field opens AI suggestions for it — click one to see them, click Apply to use one.
• If a field is empty and a plugin marks its suggestion "auto-fill," MorphMapper fills it in for you automatically, no click needed.
• Plugins are turned on per template during setup, and can be revisited from there.

Plugins are what make MorphMapper feel like it's helping rather than leaving every field to be filled in by hand. You chose which ones are active for this template during setup — this page covers what using them actually looks like day to day.

Getting a suggestion

Wherever you see the atom icon next to a field — in the entries list, or in an entry's Iterators tab — click it to open suggestions for that specific field. Each suggestion shows a preview of the value it would set, which plugin proposed it (hover to see), and an Apply button. Nothing changes until you click Apply.

Reading a suggestion card

The popover header shows a badge with either Loading while it's fetching, or a count once it's back. Each row below it shows:

• The proposed value itself (or, for a suggestion whose type is Code, a code snippet instead of a plain value).
• A badge naming the entry type the suggestion would set the field to — Simple, Code, and so on. Applying a suggestion whose type doesn't match the field's current type switches the field to that type as part of applying it, not just its value.
• Hovering the value shows a tooltip naming which plugin produced it — this is the only place the source plugin's name shows up on this popover.
• The Apply button. Nothing changes until you click it.

If the fetch itself fails, the popover shows the error message in red instead of a suggestion list. If it succeeds but comes back with nothing, you get "No suggestions available."

Iterator suggestions

The atom icon on an entry's Iterators tab opens a separate "AI iterator suggestions" popover rather than the field one — same layout (value or snippet, type badge, source on hover, Apply), but it asks plugins for iterator-shaped suggestions (repeating-structure candidates) instead of a single field's value, and applying one fills in the iterator definition rather than a field value. This variant never auto-fills — auto-fill only applies to plain field suggestions.

When it fills a field automatically

Some plugins are allowed to auto-fill: if a field is still empty and one of them offers a suggestion marked for auto-fill, MorphMapper applies it without you clicking anything. This only happens for empty fields, and only before you've started interacting with the template yourself — once you touch something, MorphMapper stops auto-applying so it doesn't overwrite your own changes. If a plugin has an auto-fill setting, you'll find it among that plugin's settings, and you can turn it off there.

A few specifics matter if auto-fill seems to have stopped working partway through a session:

• "Touching something" is tracked globally, not per field — a single click anywhere on the page turns off auto-apply for every field for the rest of that session, not just the one you clicked into.
• Each field is only auto-filled once per loaded file: MorphMapper keys the applied suggestion to the entry's ID plus the current file content, so re-opening a field you already got an auto-fill for (without reloading a different file) won't trigger it again even if you clear the value back out.
• If a field has more than one auto-fill-eligible suggestion, the first one plugins return that's marked autofill: true is the one applied — you don't get to choose between multiple auto-fill candidates the way you do when picking manually from the popover.

What's actually generating suggestions

You don't need to know which plugin is which to use them, but broadly: some scan your whole file up front (during the setup screen where you watched the progress bars) and cache what they find; others only respond when you ask for suggestions on a specific field. Detecting repeating structures for iterators (see Declaring variables with context), proposing values for a specific field, and normalizing things like number formatting are all handled by different plugins working independently — which is also why you might see more than one suggestion for the same field, each from a different source.

Changing plugin settings mid-session

You're not locked into what you chose during setup. Revisit a plugin's settings from the same screen you configured them on originally, and changes take effect for suggestions going forward.

Each setting a plugin exposes is one of four kinds, and the input you get matches the kind: a checkbox for a boolean setting (auto-fill toggles are typically this kind), a plain text field for a string setting, a number field for a numeric setting, or a dropdown for a select setting with a fixed list of choices. Which settings a given plugin has, and what each one does, is defined by that plugin — there's no generic list, so check the plugin's own setting names on this screen.