Handy To Have Argument Names In The Introspection

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

I recently got this working in DBussy:

    ravel.session_bus() \
        .get_object("org.freedesktop.Notifications", "/org/freedesktop/Notifications") \
        .get_interface("org.freedesktop.Notifications") \
        .Notify \
          (
            app_name = "test",
            replaces_id = 0,
            app_icon = "dialog-information",
            summary = "Hello World!",
            body = "D-Bus works",
            actions = [],
            hints = {},
            timeout = 5000,
          )

It is handy to have the argument names as a hint to what they mean,
rather than simply writing a long list of opaque-looking argument
values. But this depends on the introspection returning such names:

    <node>
      <interface name="org.freedesktop.Notifications">
        ...
        <method name="Notify">
          <annotation value="QVariantMap" name="com.trolltech.QtDBus.QtTypeName.In6"/>
          <arg direction="out" type="u"/>
          <arg direction="in" type="s" name="app_name"/>
          <arg direction="in" type="u" name="replaces_id"/>
          <arg direction="in" type="s" name="app_icon"/>
          <arg direction="in" type="s" name="summary"/>
          <arg direction="in" type="s" name="body"/>
          <arg direction="in" type="as" name="actions"/>
          <arg direction="in" type="a{sv}" name="hints"/>
          <arg direction="in" type="i" name="timeout"/>
        </method>

I would recommend to all those writing services for D-Bus, that they
provide this sort of thing.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a facility for including actual comments
in the introspection explaining what the interfaces and their methods
and signals actually do?