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Inside Macintosh: Interapplication Communication /

Chapter 3 - Introduction to Apple Events / About the Apple Event Manager

Supporting Apple Events as a Server Application

You do not need to implement all Apple events at once. You can begin by supporting just the required events and, if necessary, the events sent by the Edition Manager. The beginning of the section "Handling Apple Events" on page 4-4 describes how to provide this minimal level of support.

It is relatively easy to respond to the required events and the events sent by the Edition Manager. If, however, your application cannot respond to any other Apple events, other applications will not be able to request services that involve locating specific Apple event objects within your application or its documents, and users will not be able to control your application by executing scripts. To respond to Apple events it is likely to receive from other applications or from scripting components, your application must be able to respond to the appropriate core and functional-area Apple events.

Once you have provided the basic level of support for the Required suite and for events sent by the Edition Manager, you should

• decide which other Apple event suites you want to support
• define the hierarchy of Apple event objects within your application that you want scripting components or other applications to be able to identify--that is, which Apple event objects can be contained by other Apple event objects in your application
• write handlers for the Apple events you support, and install corresponding entries in your application's Apple event dispatch table

To decide which Apple event suites you want to support and how to define the hierarchy of Apple event objects in your application, consult the Apple Event Registry: Standard Suites and evaluate which Apple events and Apple event object classes make sense for your application. If necessary, you can extend the definitions of the standard Apple events and Apple events objects to cover special requirements of your application. It is better to extend the standard definitions rather than to define your own custom Apple events, because only those applications that choose to support your custom Apple events explicitly will be able to make use of them.

The chapter "Responding to Apple Events" in this book describes how to write Apple event handlers and related routines. The chapter "Resolving and Creating Object Specifier Records" describes how to resolve object specifiers in an Apple event that describes Apple event objects in your application or its documents.

If your application can respond to Apple events, you can make it scriptable simply by adding an 'aete' resource. Scripting components use your application's 'aete' resource to obtain information about the Apple events and corresponding human-language terminology that your application supports. The chapter "Apple Event Terminology Resources" in this book describes how to optimize your implementation of Apple events for use by scripting components and how to create an 'aete' resource.