[desktop entry spec] new FullName key

Francois Gouget fgouget at codeweavers.com
Tue Aug 4 03:14:20 PDT 2009


Luca Ferretti a écrit :
[...]
> The use case (i.e. the need to expose in the UI Name+GenericName) that
> come in my mind is File -> Open with $Application in file manager (and
> any other method to "link" file type and application). I suppose the
> KickOff approach is inapplicable here.
[...]
> Any other use case?

So for reference I'll mention the problem I have had in 
_programmatically_ translating Windows associations to XDG associations.

For a given application like "Microsoft PowerPoint for Windows", I 
typically find a number of 'verbs' such as "New", "Open", "Print" and 
"Show". Ideally this would be translated into XDG actions but 
unfortunately they don't seem to be well supported (though maybe I need 
to revisit the issue).

So I typically create separate associations with the Name field set to 
"verb with application-name". There is no generic name on the windows 
side so I set it to an arbitrary value. So that gives something like this:
    Name=Show with Microsoft PowerPoint for Windows
    GenericName=Windows Association (CrossOver)

Of course I omit the verb if it is 'Open'. For other verbs the result is 
not ideal as it results in something like 'Open with Show with ...', but 
at least this makes it possible to use all the windows associations.

Closer to what it being discussed here, we also programmatically convert 
the windows 'Start Menu' entries into XDG menus, and for these we don't 
set GenericName because there's none on the Windows side and because 
setting it to something like 'Windows Start Menu (CrossOver)' would 
result in that to be appended to the name which is unwanted. However we 
do have a description field on the windows side so we put it in the 
Comment field, so it gets helpfully shown as a tooltip when the user 
lingers on the menu (here the French version):

    Name=Microsoft PowerPoint
    Comment=Créez et modifiez des présentations pour des diaporamas, 
réunions et pages Web en utilisant Microsoft PowerPoint.

It feels like there's a bit of overlap between the GenericName and the 
Comment fields; or at least that there's one too many: with tooltips 
showing two fields is easy; but showing three fields is harder.

-- 
Francois Gouget
fgouget at codeweavers.com



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