[Telepathy] handling custom channels

[Dafydd Harries]

Ar 28/02/2008 am 06:53, ysgrifennodd harini satyanarayanan:
> hi,
>   I am working on maemo+telepathy+mission control to create an
> application that can exchange pictorial information.I am trying to
> create a custom channel in telepathy but not sure how it is done,
> cause all references only speak about already existing channels.
> 
> In the mission-control wiki I read that If an application wants to
> create a channel and handle it itself, it shouldn't go through the MC
> since only the application is responsible for that channel.also that
> all channel requests going through the MC will be dispatched with the
> .chandler mechanism. I am not sure how should custom channels be
> handled? Do you have some pointers   to some examples?
> 
> I was asked to look into empathy to figure out how these work, but I
> assume that the .chandler files in empathy are for the standard text
> and audio/video channel.I doubt if empathy is using any custom
> channels.
> 
> Also I was seeing if there was a way i can embed these messages onto
> anyone of the existing channels but I couldn't find much documentation
> on that too............I was hoping i sent these messages along with
> text messages and use the Channel_Text_Message_Type_Action flag to
> tell the application not to treat it as a normal message. Is this
> possible?
> 
> Sorry about so many questions....any help is greatly appreciated.

Each connection manager can only support those channel types that it has been
programmed to support. Each channel type it supports is mapped to the
underlying protocols. I.e. if the CM supports the Text channel type, it has
code to map that to sending and receiving text messages in the protocols it
supports.

For applications that need to communicate in ways not supported by other
channel types, we have tubes, which are intended to support general
communication.

If you don't have a connection manager that doesn't support tubes, you could
layer your application messages over text channels, but on Maemo, Mission
Control will hand text channels to the chat UI.

I hope this clarifies things.

-- 
Dafydd