app id in desktop file

[David Faure]

On Saturday 07 May 2011, Ryan Lortie wrote:
> For example, desktop environments could use it to match between the DBus
> name acquired by the application (which would be the same as the
> application ID) in order to match it with the desktop file.

Yes this is very much needed, to know when an application successfully 
started, by watching it register to DBus.

We do this in KDE with X-DBUS-StartupType and X-DBUS-ServiceName in the 
.desktop file.

From the KToolInvocation api docs (you can parse it with 
s/service/application/, in this context) :

"The way a service gets started depends on the 'X-DBUS-StartupType' entry in 
the desktop file of the service. There are three possibilities:

X-DBUS-StartupType=None (default) -- Always start a new service, don't wait 
till the service registers with D-Bus.
X-DBUS-StartupType=Multi -- Always start a new service, wait until the service 
has registered with D-Bus.
X-DBUS-StartupType=Unique -- Only start the service if it isn't already 
running, wait until the service has registered with D-Bus. The .desktop file 
can specify the name that the application will use when registering using X-
DBUS-ServiceName=org.domain.myapp. Otherwise org.kde.binaryname is assumed."

-- 
David Faure, faure at kde.org, http://www.davidfaure.fr
Sponsored by Nokia to work on KDE, incl. Konqueror (http://www.konqueror.org).