Re: Notifying applications

[David Chisnall]

On 21 Feb 2008, at 15:05, Andreas Höschler wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I have a special problem. A foreign non-GNUstep application  
> (actually Star Office) is currently been modified to call a script  
> whenever a user saves a file. I would like to use this to trigger an  
> action in a GNUstep application (grab the Star Office file from the  
> temporary directory and store it in a database).
>
> The question is, how can a script (GNUstep tool) send a notification  
> to a GNUstep application? I used tcp sockets so far for IPC but this  
> does not seem to be appropriate in this case. Any ideas?
>
> Thanks,
>
>   Andreas

If all you need is a notification, then you can send a distributed  
notification.  The simplest way of doing this would be to write a  
simple tool that would put its arguments into the userinfo dictionary  
for a distributed notification and then send it.

My code would look something like this:

int main(int argc, char ** argv)
{
        [[NSDistributedNotificationCenter defaultCenter]
                postNotificationName:@"File Modified"
                object:[NSString stringWithUTF8String:argv[1]
		userInfo:[NSDictionary dictionaryWithObject:[NSString  
stringWithUTF8String:argv[2]]
                        forKey:@"Filename"]
                deliverImmediately:YES];
        return 0;
}

You'd compile this to something like notify and then call it from your  
shell script as:

notify "StarOffice" $FILENAME

In your GNUstep code you'd then listen for distributed notifications  
from the StarOffice application.

David