Discovering services

[Tako Schotanus]

Jamie McCracken wrote:
> Tako Schotanus wrote:
>
>>
>> So what is the usecase where you would want to know what a 
>> non-activated service supports?
>>
>
> If you are in a script editor or IDE style app and you are writing a 
> remote control script you might want to look at what services are 
> avilable and what interfaces/methods these have without activating 
> them all.
>
Yes, but that doesn't address the problem of services that have no fixed 
object tree like the example I gave about the printer manager. It is 
even conceivable that the interface(s) supported by those objects is not 
known.

For an IDE or script editor it might be enough to just have an 
"activate" option on the non-active services. For something that will 
happen only at development time it would not be much of a hassle. Most 
likely you will only want to generate a proxy or something for that 
particular service or object, so having to perform an explicit action to 
make the introspection data available doesn't seem like a big problem.

But yes, having to specifically activate the service will make it 
impossible to for example do a search for a specific object, interface 
or method/signal, but that doesn't seem like something we would really 
need anyway.

At this moment I just can't see how we could put the introspection data 
in a file except for services whose object tree and interfaces are 
completely/mostly static.

But maybe a combination of things might be a possibility: if you know 
your service is static you can provide introspection data in a file 
while those that don't will need to be activated first. But anyhow it 
seems like a bad idea to do the activation automatically, it should be a 
conscious action by the user IMO.

Cheers,
 -Tako