Re: [Pyobjc-dev] Find By Content

[Pierce T. W. I. <pi...@tw...>]

On Friday, November 14, 2003, at 02:17 PM, Bob Ippolito wrote:

>
> 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.

  Actually, the easiest way to wrap a C framework for Python is to write  
an Obj-C wrapper for it, IMHO.

  That's what I've been doing.

  Often you can find someone else who's done the work for you...

  Pierce