"Brian Mathis" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
news:50102@palm-dev-forum...
> Has this made it into any official documentation?
I thought it had, but it looks like I'm wrong. But I know this area is being
worked on, so I'm sure this will be better in the next rev of the
documentation. Here are some quotes from the Mar 4, 2001 version of the 4.0
Companion:
1. "The type value should be set to sysFileTApplication for the executable's
database and can be set to any value for other databases associated with an
application."
2. "Note that the Creator ID is only needed for the application (database of
type 'appl') not for all other databases."
3. "Creator types with all lowercase letters are reserved by Palm, Inc."
I'd change (1) to indicate that types consisting entirely of lowercase
letters are reserved. I'd change (2) to indicate that creator IDs apply to
all databases, not just applications. I'd change (3) to use the term
"creator IDs" rather than "creator types" and to be more explicit that types
such as 'foo-' are NOT reserved.
> I always figured that the type really didn't have anything to do with the
> OS, that it was just a way to help developers organize data a little more
> elegantly then by using filenames.
That sums it up pretty well. It would be even better if you could have
several databases with the same name, but with different type and/or
creator. But the type is still useful for organizing an application's
databases into groups.
> We know about 'appl' type, and special treatment
> of 'DATA' types.. anything else?
I'm not sure what you're referring to here. I don't know of any special
treatment of 'DATA' databases (or 'Data' or 'data'). There are several other
special types besides 'appl' though. See SystemResources.h for a list of
them. For example:
- The type 'ovly' is used to indicate that a database is an overlay for the
application with the same creator ID.
- The type 'panl' is used to indicate a Prefs panel.
- The type 'pqa ' (that's a space at the end) is used to identify a PQA.
The last one violates our naming conventions, but all the others consist
entirely of lowercase letters. If you create a database that uses any of our
reserved types, it could be treated by the OS as something it's not. Of
course, this is fine if it's intentional. It's okay to create overlays, for
example. But you wouldn't want a shopping-list app to store your grocery
list in a database of type 'ovly'.
--
Danny
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