activation thought

[Waldo Bastian]

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On Wednesday 15 October 2003 07:50 am, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Summary of KDE activation from the docs, people with a clue please
> correct me: a query language for locating .desktop files. But desktop
> files can point to shared libraries or DCOP services, not only
> executables.
>
> http://developer.kde.org/documentation/library/3.1-api/kio/html/classKServi
>ce.html
> http://developer.kde.org/documentation/library/3.1-api/kio/html/classKTrade
>r.html
> http://developer.kde.org/documentation/library/kdeqt/tradersyntax.html
>
> Essentially KTrader can run queries, and queries return a KService which
> is basically the same as GnomeDesktopItem, i.e. a .desktop file
> representation.
>
> An interesting thing about this is that it uses the same implementation
> (file format, query language, ksycoca cache) for all activation, but
> there are several different kinds of things to be activated.

That's fairly accurate.

Basically everything that can be activated is a KService. Each KService is 
described by a .desktop file. The kind of service a KService provides is 
described by KServiceType. A particular KService implements one or more 
KServiceTypes. The "Application" KServiceType is the most obvious one, it 
represents an executable that is typically shown in the menu.

KMimeType is a specialisation of KServiceType for the purpose of file 
handling. It conveys the message "this service is able to handle files of the 
mimetype foo/bar"

The service types of a typical application able to handle foo/bar files would 
be "Application;foo/bar;"

A common servicetype other than "Application" is "KParts/ReadOnlyPart", which 
basically indicates a KPart that can be embedded in Konqueror.

The service types of such KPart could be "KParts/ReadOnlyPart;foo/bar;"

Note that KTrader doesn't actually do the activation itself, it just tells you 
about the available services (in order of user preference). For out-of-
process services (executables) klauncher can do the activation. For in-
process services (DSOs) KLibLoader / KLibFactory provides methods for 
creating the required objects.

Cheers,
Waldo
- -- 
bastian@kde.org -=|[ SUSE, The Linux Desktop Experts ]|=- bastian@suse.com
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