Retired Document

Important: This document may not represent best practices for current development. Links to downloads and other resources may no longer be valid.

Technical Q&A QA1083

Dynamically registering a bundled component

Q: I have a QuickTime Component located in my Application bundle which I would like to register dynamically. Using `CFBundle` APIs, I can find my component bundle, get its resource map then call `RegisterComponentResourceFile`. While this seems to work as expected, calling `OpenAComponent` returns a paramErr. Is there another way to dynamically register a component which resides in an application bundle?

A: You can use the Mac OS X APIs RegisterComponentFileRef or RegisterComponentFileRefEntries. These APIs allow you to register a file system reference. The Component Manager will correctly register the reference regardless of whether the Component is a Mach-O bundle, standard resource fork based CFM component, CFM bundle, or packaged bundle.

The RegisterComponentFileRefEntries API allows you to specify a component description which is used to register selective components.

These APIs are declared in Components.h, part of the CoreServices.framework.

Listing 1 Registering a bundled component.

OSErr RegisterMyBundledComponent(void)

    CFBundleRef mainBundleRef = NULL;

    CFURLRef    resourceURLRef = NULL;

    FSRef       resourceFSRef;

    OSErr       err = paramErr;

    // get the application's main bundle

    mainBundleRef = CFBundleGetMainBundle();

    if (NULL != mainBundleRef) {

        // return the location of a resource

        // contained in the specified bundle

        resourceURLRef = CFBundleCopyResourceURL(mainBundleRef,

                                                 CFSTR("MyBundledComponent"),

                                                 CFSTR("component"), 0);

        if (NULL != resourceURLRef) {

            // convert the url to an FSRef

           if (CFURLGetFSRef(resourceURLRef, &resourceFSRef) == true) {

                // register the component

                // the component manager will "do the right thing"

                // regardless of how the component was built

                // passing false for the second parameter registers the

                // component locally

                err = RegisterComponentFileRef(&resourceFSRef, false);

            CFRelease(resourceURLRef);

    return err;

Document Revision History

Date	Notes
2004-06-07	New document that describes how to dynamically register a Component which resides in an Application bundle.