Basic Application Integration

Basic application integration is a set of highly recommended tasks you should perform.

• Basic Integration Features

• Basic Integration Tasks

Basic integration does not involve extensive use of the desktop application programmer's interface (API). Therefore, it does not provide other interaction with the desktop, such as drag and drop, session management, ToolTalk messaging, and programmatic access to the actions and data-typing database.

A few of the integration tasks covered in this chapter require source code modification. They are optional, and are discussed here because they are closely related to basic integration tasks.

Basic Integration Features

Basic application integration provides these features for end users:

• A graphical way to locate and start your application on the desktop

  Your application will provide a desktop registration package, and your installation script will automatically register your application.

  Registration creates an application group at the top level of Application Manager. The application group contains an icon the user double-clicks to start the application.

• The ability to recognize and manipulate your application's data files

  Your application will provide data types for its data files.

  Data typing configures data files to use a unique icon to help users identify them. The data files also have meaningful desktop behavior. For example, the user can start your application by double-clicking a data file; dropping a data file on a desktop printer drop zone prints the file using the appropriate print command.

• Easy font and color selection using Style Manager

  Your application will change interface fonts and background, foreground, and shadow colors dynamically.

  The desktop defines general interface font and color resources that are used if no corresponding application-specific resources exist.

Basic integration provides these advantages to system administrators:

• Easy installation and registration

  Upon installation, the application is automatically registered. The system administrator has little or no additional work to do.

• Easy ongoing administration

  All the desktop's configuration files are gathered in one location. Furthermore, the application can easily be unregistered if, for example, the administrator wants to update it or to move it to a different application server.

Organization of Basic Integration Information

Most of the tasks involved in basic integration are also performed by system administrators who are integrating an existing application into the desktop. Therefore, most basic integration documentation is located in the chapter "Registering an Application" in the Solaris Common Desktop Environment: Advanced User's and System Administrator's Guide.

This chapter guides you to that information and contains additional information specific to application programming.

Basic Integration Tasks

These are the general tasks involved in basic integration:

• Modify any application resources that set fonts and colors. This allows users to change the application's interface fonts and colors using Style Manager.

  See the section on modifying font and color resources in the chapter "Registering an Application" in the Solaris Common Desktop Environment: Advanced User's and System Administrator's Guide.

• Create the registration package for your application.

  See the text Creating a Registration Package for Your Application and "Registering an Application" in the Solaris Common Desktop Environment: Advanced User's and System Administrator's Guide.

• Modify your application's installation script to install the registration package files and perform the registration procedure.

  See the section on registering the application using dtappintegrate in the chapter "Registering an Application" in the Solaris Common Desktop Environment: Advanced User's and System Administrator's Guide.

• Print application data files on networked and local printers. The desktop printer model provides a graphical way for users to print and is built on top of the native networking capabilities of the UNIX lp service.

Levels of Printing

The printing functionality available to the user depends on the level of integration you use. There are three levels of print integration:

• Complete print integration

  You should do complete integration if you have the ability to modify the application's source code.

  When you do complete print integration, users can print data files on various printers by dropping them on printer drop zones (the Front Panel Printer control and printer icons in Print Manager). Certain other desktop behaviors are also implemented (see Desktop Printing Environment Variables).

• Partial print integration

  You should do partial integration if you do not have the ability to modify the application's source code, but you do have the ability to invoke printing by way of an action.

  When you do partial integration, your application provides a subset of full-integration functionality. For example, by using the LPDEST environment variable, your application's printing mechanism will obtain the print destination from the drop zone.

• No print integration.

  If an application cannot supply a print action for its data files, you should configure the data files to display an error dialog box when users drop the files on printer drop zones.