Writing a Python plugin that will export the binary version of the function(s) selected in the UI.

[kovar-ursa]

Greetings,

I'd like to allow the user to select one or more functions in the UI and then export the original binary for each function, one at a time, to a process running on another server via a REST API call.

I've got the plugin installed and running, it reads a config file to get the server address, it prompts the user for some information, but then I'm stuck - how do I determine what function(s) the user has selected in the UI?

Thank you.

-David
Thank you.

[psifertex]

There's a few ways you could do this:

These would work for a single function:

• First, you could use register_for_function (https://api.binary.ninja/binaryninja.plugin-module.html#binaryninja.plugin.PluginCommand.register_for_function). Unfortunately that would only work for a single function at a time, but in the UI that would allow users to right click in a function or specifically on a call to a function and activate your plugin that way.
• The second way would be to use the existing interaction APIs (specifically the ChoiceField) to populate a drop-down with a list of functions to let the user select the function. This is a bit more tedious, you can see some examples of using custom forms like this in the angr example

However, if you want to select multiple functions your options are more limited and it requires a lot more work primarily because there's no existing UI/API around a multi-select so you'd need to write your own custom QT. Either to try to inspect/walk the existing UI elements to identify in the symbol list for example which functions are selected, or to render your own popup that would provide something like checkboxes.

If you go that route, here's some boiler-plate code:

from PySide6.QtWidgets import (
    QApplication,
    QDialog,
    QVBoxLayout,
    QListWidget,
    QListWidgetItem,
    QDialogButtonBox,
)
import sys


class MultiSelectDialog(QDialog):
    def __init__(self, items, parent=None):
        super().__init__(parent)
        self.setWindowTitle("Select Items")

        # Main layout
        layout = QVBoxLayout(self)

        # Scrollable list
        self.list_widget = QListWidget(self)
        self.list_widget.setSelectionMode(QListWidget.MultiSelection)  # Enable multi-selection
        for item in items:
            QListWidgetItem(item, self.list_widget)

        layout.addWidget(self.list_widget)

        # Buttons
        button_box = QDialogButtonBox(QDialogButtonBox.Ok | QDialogButtonBox.Cancel, self)
        button_box.accepted.connect(self.accept)
        button_box.rejected.connect(self.reject)
        layout.addWidget(button_box)

    def selected_items(self):
        return [item.text() for item in self.list_widget.selectedItems()]


if __name__ == "__main__":
    app = QApplication(sys.argv)

    # Sample data
    items = [f"Item {i}" for i in range(1, 101)]  # Long list of items

    dialog = MultiSelectDialog(items)
    if dialog.exec():
        print("Selected Items:", dialog.selected_items())
    else:
        print("No selection made.")

    sys.exit(app.exec())

Adapt as required inside a BN script by making sure you first import binaryninjaui (which should load the appropriate PySide6 paths) and of course removing the main section.