Optional parameters
- Components of Apple Events
- Open Documents Event
- Apple Event Manager
- Edition Manager
- Edition Manager Events
- Apple Event Types
Apple events provide your application with a standard mechanism for
communicating with other applications. You can use Apple events and the
by the Finder
users to share data among documents created by multiple applications
• provide services to other applications. See
• request services from other applications. See
By supporting the required Apple Events, your application can take advantage
of the more reliable launch and termination mechanisms built into system 7.0.
You can also take advantage of the services provided by the Edition Manager
by responding to the Apple events sent by the
Edition Manager. These and additional core Apple events can be used by
nearly all applications to communicate with system software or with other
applications.
You can also support functional-area Apple events related to your application
in order to provide services to other applications or to request services from
other applications. Finally, if your application defines Apple events for all the
actions that a user can perform, you can record user actions by generating the
corresponding Apple event for each action, saving a copy of the Apple event,
and then sending the Apple event to your own application for handling. Apple
events that are recorded in this way can later be played back to automate tasks
previously performed by the user.
To support Apple events in your application, you must
• decide which Apple events (in addition to the required ones) to
• set bits in the 'SIZE' resource to indicate that your application
• create an Apple event dispatch table. See
• include code to handle high-level events in your main event loop. See
• handle the Apple events your application receives and wishes to
• create the Apple events you wish your application to generate. See
Introduction to Apple Events
Applications typically use Apple events to request services from and provide
services to other applications. Thus, the Open Documents event, sent by the
Finder, requests that your application open specified documents. When your
application supports this Apple event, it should respond by opening those
documents in the manner that your application normally opens documents.
A transaction involving Apple events is initiated by a "client application",
which sends an Apple event to request a service (for example, printing a list of
files, spell- checking a list of words, or performing a numerical calculation).
The application providing the service is called a "server application". These
applications can reside on the same local computer or on remote computers
connected to a network.
The following figure shows a common Apple event, the
Open Documents event. You see that the Finder application is the client; it
requests that the SurfWriter application open the documents named Dec.
Invoice and Nov. Invoice. The SurfWriter application responds to the Finder's
request by opening windows containing the specified documents.
An Open Documents event
The Finder is also the source application of the Open Documents event. A
source application is one that sends an Apple event to another application or to
itself. In the figure above, the SurfWriter application is the target application
of the event. The target application is the one addressed to receive the Apple
event. The terms client application and source application are not always
synonymous, nor are the terms server application and target application.
Typically, an Apple event client sends an Apple event requesting a service from
an Apple event server; in this case, the server is the target application of the
Apple event. The Apple event server may send back a different Apple event as a
response-in which case, the client becomes the target of the responding Apple
event.