Infotips for Microsoft Windows Explorer

OpenOffice.org 2.0 Windows Integration

Document - ID	Specification Owner	Last Change	Status
	Tino Rachui	19.12.2003	Final
Conforms to	
Applies to	Windows Desktop Integration
Task ID(s)	#97686#
Category	Feature

Abstract

Infotip handler are small tooltip windows that show essential information about a file. The Windows Explorer shows such infotips if the mouse hovers over a file for a few seconds. By registering a custom infotip handler the Windows Explorer is able to show OpenOffice.org specific file meta information.

i-Team Members (The specification Owner is part of the i-Team)

	Name	E-mail Address
User Experience	Matthias Müller-Prove (MMP)	mmp@openoffice.org
Development	Tino Rachui (TRA)	tra@openoffice.org
	Gorden Lin (deuce)	deuce@openoffice.org
Quality Assurance	Thorsten Martens (TM)	tm@openoffice.org
Documentation	Frank Peters	fpe@sun.com

Approved for Implementation

	Approved by	Date
User Experience	Matthias Müller-Prove (MMP)	19.12.03
Development	Tino Rachui	06.01.04
Development	Gorden Lin (deuce)	06.01.04
Quality Assurance	Thorsten Martens	06.01.04
Documentation		
String Review	Elizabeth Matthis	01.03.04

Document Change History

Rev. Level	Change	Initials	Date
1.0	Specification setup	TRA	06.11.03
	spec review	MMP	04.12.03
	spec rework after iTeam meeting	TRA	12.05.03
	Some minor corrections regarding the form of the document	TRA	12.12.03
	Accepted changes after approval by MMP	TRA	19.12.03
	Changes after string review by EM	TRA	01.03.04

Contents

Glossary	1

1	Motivation	1

2	Goals	1

3	Requirements and Dependencies	2

3.1	Requirements	2

3.2	Technical Dependencies	2

4	Competitive Analyses	2

5	Detailed Specification	3

5.1	Error Conditions	3

6	Notes	3

7	References	3

Glossary

Term	Description
Infotip	small tooltip windows that show essential information about a file. The Windows Explorer shows such infotips if the mouse hovers over a file for a few second.
Infotip handler	A function that is used by Windows Explorer to display infotips for a given file.

Motivation

Infotip handler are small tooltip windows that show essential information about a file. The Windows Explorer shows such infotips if the mouse hovers over a file for a few seconds. By registering a custom infotip handler the Windows Explorer is able to show OpenOffice.org specific file meta information. For a list of meta information which are stored in an OOo file have a look at the OASIS file format specification.

Illustration 1 Infotip shown for an OOo file. The tip displays information on creator, recent author, creation date, and modification date Goals

n.a

Requirements and Dependencies

Requirements

To achieve a better system integration, OOo 2.0 will make increased use of information and infrastructure that is provided with the Gnome desktop instead of creating platform independent solutions. The same applies to the Windows Desktop.

Technical Dependencies

This feature will work only with Windows ME or higher, Windows 2000, and Windows XP .

This feature will not decrease the performance of the Windows Explorer or the Windows Shell as it will be implemented independently of any of the heavy weight OpenOffice.org libraries.

Competitive Analyses

Microsoft Office provides its own infotip handler for the Windows Explorer that displays additional information about Microsoft Office documents. Table 1 list the type of information that will be displayed for Microsoft documents. Only information that the user provided are visible.

Type of Information	Comment
Type	The type of the document, e.g. “Microsoft Word Document”
Author	The author of the document
Title	The title of the document
Subject	A subject
Comment	Comments
Date Modified	The date when the document was last edited
Size	The size of the document in KB

Table 1Types of information display for Microsoft Documents in Infotip windows

Detailed Specification

Table 2 shows the types of information which an OOo infotip window is supposed to display. Information for which no data are available shall be completely invisible, e.g. if the user doesn't specify a title for a document the title item (Item 3) shall not at all be visible in the infotip window, instead the next item for which data are available should follow.

String list

Item	English	German	Comments
Item 1	Type:	Typ:	The type of the document, e.g. OpenOffice.org Writer Document
Item 2	Author:	Autor:	The author of the document
Item 3	Title:	Titel:	The title of the document
Item 4	Subject:	Thema:	A subject
Item 5	Comments:	Kommentar:	Comments
Item 6	Modified:	Geändert am:	The date and time when the document was last edited
Item 7	Size:	Größe:	The size of the document in KB

Table 2String list

Error Conditions

In case of errors for instance an OpenOffice.org file is corrupted the infotip handler simply does nothing and no information will be provided to the Windows Explorer. In this case no infotip window will be shown for the corrupted OOo file.

Notes

TR-1: Which information do we want to display?

We will show the same types of information that will be display for Microsoft documents (see table 1).

TR-2: Should the user be able to configure which information will be displayed, e.g. via registry settings?

No need to make this configurable for the user.

TRA: Approval by documentation not necessary because this feature will not be documented, but they took note of this specification.

References

Microsoft Developers Network Library (MSDN)

Creating Shell Extension Handlers

Shell Interfaces

MSDN IQueryInfo Interface

OASIS file format specification

Required - Give references to related documentation, such as engineering designs, technical specs, and other sources for related units. Also include links to documents that other sections in this spec need to refer to, such as user opinions usability test reports.

Integration into Microsoft Windows - Infotip Handler for the Windows Explorer

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http://specs.openoffice.org/appwide/desktop_integration/windows_explorer_infotip_handler.sxw

Tino Rachui

2003-11-05T13:57:56