Application Inspector

alpha version, October 2000

The setting and maintaining the application attributes, like its UID, icon or capabilities, was in the Symbian SDK always somewhat black magic. The XSdk aims to make the task easy, using the application inspector panel.

You can use the application inspector whenever the application attributes are to be changed. This is not an "application generating": no fixed source files are generated; rather, the information is kept in the project, and used whenever the application is built to generate a proper result.

Contents

• Opening the inspector describes where the inspector is to be found;
• in Inspector Panel all the controls are shown and described;
• Command Line explains how to specify the application capabilities in a "ProjectBuilderless" XSdk.

Opening the inspector

Whenever the current project contains an Epoc Application, there is a menu item "App Inspector", automatically added to the "XSdk Tools" submenu of the main application "Tools" menu:

Choose the command to open the inspector panel for the curent project.

Inspector Panel

The Application Inspector panel contains controls for more or less all application attributes: the caption and default document name, application UID and icon, application help, and application capabilities. For a conveniency, the project version is available here, too.

The only "application attributes" this panel does not maintain are those directly linked to commands: application menu, toolbar, and hot keys. They are made and edited through the Menu&Toolbar inspector, described in other document.

Like in all other XSdk panels, the Assistant icon in the right top corner opens an appropriate help page. The functions of the other controls are described below.

Caption and document name

The application caption is its "official name", to be shown eg. in the Extras bar. There is only ne caption in this panel, and it should be expressed in the project's default human langauge (see the generic assistant); captions in other languages are specified consistently through the XSdk localization support. The caption will be eventually written to the AIF file.

The default document name will be eventually put to the standard application resource file. Fill it for document-based applications only. There is more than the (non)existence of this name to distinguish a document-based from a non-document-based application; some standard services have to be implemented one or other way. A standard implementation of them can be generated by the Application Assistant when the project was created; should you decide to change, say, a document-based application to a non-document-based one or vice versa, you have to change the sources manually.

Versioning support and application UID

The access to those information is put into this panel for convenience only. You can check or change the versioning information and the UIDs for each project or subproject using the generic subproject inspector; read please the appropriate document to learn about using these controls.

You can also check the UID management for information how the XSdk helps you to maintain the unique ID numbers in general.

Application icon and help

In the alpha version there is no help editor, and thence the "Application Help" button does nothing. Lacking the editor, though, does not mean there is no helkp support at all: with any application which uses the XSdk Extended API you need only to provide the help file, and the application will automatically find it, offer the appropriate menu item to the user, and show the help when asked to.

Therefore, you only have to prepare the help file: the easiest way is to make a standard Data document with the appropriate contents, and then rename it to have an application name and the ".hlp" extension (though the Symbian guys say the extensions are not used to distinguish file types in Epoc, it is not a full truth--the help files are distinguished just that way). Or, in case you happen to work in the Windows, you can use the Symbian's Aleppo tool, but like all other Symbian tools it is not particularly luxurious.

Then add the help file to the project's "Other Resources" group, so as it is automatically placed into the application whenever it is built, and that's all.

So as to specify the application icon, the XSdk MBM View is used. Since it is widely used in different parts of the XSdk visual programming support, it is in detail described in an extra document; shortly, you can drag'n'drop an image in any standard format to it, or you can click to it to open a pop-up menu:

The option shown on the picture is the most general one (and it is the one which is internally called when a picture is drag'n'dropped there): for a simple image formats like bmp it allows to combine more of them to a multi-bitmap with masks. You can use a decent format like TIFF though--it supports natively both the masks (in a form of the alpha channel) and the more bitmaps in one picture (in a form of different representations). That's why the export service saves the bitmap into the TIFF.

Application capabilities

The Epoc application capabilities are set by an intuitive way using the radio button, check boxes, and the table for the MIME types. I hope there is no need to describe the radio button and the checkboxes. The MIME types can be defined using the small buttons below the table, or they can be edited directly inside:

In the alpha version, there is one serious limitation though: the MIME types are not placed into the generated AIF file! The problem is entirely on the Symbian side: their AIF format is not documented anywhere, and we haven't cracked yet its MIME part. It is not that difficult, though, so the support will be for sure in the next release.

Command line

There is currently no command line tool to specify the application attributes; when using a "ProjectBuilderless" XSdk, you have to set the appropriate values manually in the PB.project file. See the Makefiles document for the general PB.project file format. The appropriate keys and values are:

The keys and values for the UID and versioning support are described in the Generic Inspector help page.

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