# Third-party support

This section of the documentation is intended for developers who want to add support for third-party software to the VRE language.
Currently, we interface with other codes via calculators provided by the [Atomistic Simulation Environment (ASE)](https://ase-lib.org/).
If your code has no ASE calculator yet, we encourage you to add first a calculator to ASE and then continue as follows:

1. Add the name of the method and potentially additional desired output options to the grammar at `src/virtmat/language/grammar/virtmat.tx`.
2. Add the method, desired properties and their associated handlers to the data frame `ase_p_df` in `src/virtmat/language/utilities/ase_handlers.py`.
3. Add the method to the `spec` in `src/virtmat/language/utilities/ase_params.py`.
4. If you need a handler for a custom property, then add the name of the property to `src/virtmat/language/utilities/typemap.py`.
5. Add tests to `tests/test_amml.py`.
6. Add an entry to the table in the docs under `docs/amml.md`.
7. Add an example to `examples/`.
8. Add an entry to the `CHANGELOG.md`.