Programming Guide

Extending OpenDoc

This chapter describes how you can use or alter portions of the OpenDoc class library to enhance the capabilities of your part editors.

Before reading this chapter, you should be familiar with the concepts presented in "Introduction" and "Development Overview". For additional concepts related to your part editor's run-time environment, see "OpenDoc Run-Time Features".

This chapter discusses the following ways in which you can extend OpenDoc:

• By creating OpenDoc extension objects for your part editor, you can add programming interfaces to your parts for any purpose.

• By creating a settings extension, you can give users access to editor-specific settings through the Properties notebook.          

• By creating specialized dispatch modules, you can define new kinds of user events that your parts can respond to.

• By creating specialized focus modules, you can define new categories of focuses (shared resources) that your parts can acquire and exchange.

• By creating a subclass of ODTransform, you can extend the ways in which your part transforms the images it draws.

• By creating a shell plug-in, a modification of the functions of the document shell, you can add additional document-wide capabilities to OpenDoc.

• By patching (replacing) specific OpenDoc objects, you can modify some of the fundamental capabilities of OpenDoc.