Re: [Pyobjc-dev] Find By Content

[Bob I. <bo...@re...>]

On Nov 14, 2003, at 3:43 PM, Dethe Elza wrote:

> I am trying to get started using PyObjC.  What I'm interested in is  
> creating a command-line search tool using the Find By Content API,  
> which is in the ApplicationServices framework.  But I haven't been  
> able to figure out how to bootstrap far enough to find the API calls  
> from Python.
>
> Is the ApplicationServices framework already exposed by PyObjC?
>
> If not, how do I wrap it?  I've tried to follow the instructions here:  
> http://pyobjc.sourceforge.net/doc/wrapping.php, but haven't had luck  
> with it.

ApplicationServices is not an Objective C framework, it can not be  
wrapped (directly) with PyObjC.

As you can see by the documentation (  
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Carbon/Reference/ 
Find_By_Content/index.html ), it's part of Carbon.  Carbon frameworks  
are a lot more work to wrap.  You'll want to use a tool like bgen,  
Pyrex, or SWIG .. or just write the bindings by hand (see "Extending  
and Embedding" and "Python/C API" at http://www.python.org/doc/current/  
).  It's not very fun.  There's also the option of writing an ObjC  
framework that wraps the C functions, but that doesn't look like it  
would make much sense in this case as the functions are not primarily  
CoreFoundation based.  In short, it's not possible to wrap any APi that  
was available in Mac OS before OS X (and even several new APIs that are  
not ObjC) using PyObjC (directly).

Currently, the only part of the Find by Content API that is wrapped are  
the error codes ;)  You're on your own here, properly wrapping about 50  
functions and having them work correctly takes a good while even if you  
know the tools well.  You may want to ask on pythonmac-sig if anyone  
wants to volunteer to write it, or to help write it.

-bob