Re: Dynamic Services?
Re: Dynamic Services?
- Subject: Re: Dynamic Services?
- From: Douglas Davidson <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 30 Aug 2001 10:21:17 -0700
On Tuesday, August 28, 2001, at 02:34 AM, Evan Gross wrote:
What I'd like to be able to do is provide services from my app, based on
some sort of plug-in (or other dynamically loaded,
single-file-or-packaged
user-installable entity). So my app would ideally scan for the
existence of
these "Service plug-ins" in a couple of known places (in my own bundle,
and
perhaps in Application Support) and somehow let the system know of their
existence.
And that (letting the system know) seems to be a sticky issue. Since an
application's (these services would be provided by a regular
AppKit-based
application) services appear to have to be pre-specified in its
info.plist,
each NSServices entry fully-formed, well - you see the problem.
Knowing what little I know (just started with Cocoa a couple months
ago) the
only thing I can think of would be to figure out the services I can vend
(based on what "service plug-ins" are available and modify my app's
info.plist file when my app launches. YUCK. Besides the fact that you
can't
count on having write permission to the app, it seems to me like a bad
solution any way you look at it. Even if I did this, the user would
still
need to log out and back in again to see any changes that may have been
made
(services added/removed).
What you are looking for is what is known as "add-on services". Usually
one advertises an application's services in the application's bundle,
but it isn't actually necessary to do this. You can create a separate
bundle in one of the Services directories with no executable of its own,
that specifies services to be provided by some application elsewhere.
Douglas Davidson