Windows 7 Ultimate Accelerator Creation Guide - IE

Introduction There are a lot of honestly cool solutions these days, and I believe a lot of them would match in essentially nicely with Accelerators. But regardless that there is plenty of worth to become had in setting up Accelerators, I really don't presume we’ve ever had a blogging site submit explaining a step-by-step process for how to do it. I’m hoping this submit will guide with that. I’ve been working around the characteristic to get a even though, so I’ve come up with some recommendations and ideal practices which have served me turn into even more effective in generating Accelerators. There's also a handful of faults I’ve noticed (and crafted!) over and over once again, so I’ll converse about these from the desire of making the growth course of action a bit simplier and easier for everybody else in existence. Building an Accelerator Accelerators streamline the normal copy-navigate-paste operation by enabling customers to send selected information through the latest webpage to an individual of their favourite services. Thankfully, even though the characteristic is quite powerful, it is genuinely really quite easy to compose code that makes use of it. Here’s a step-by-step manual for creating an easy Accelerator. Very first, I’ve place up an Accelerator template, with sample knowledge pre-loaded. All it is advisable to do is swap out the sample important information for yours. Notice that you simply really don't must be the services supplier to create an accelerator that interacts using a services. If you're able to obtain the following specifics, then you certainly can build up an accelerator for pretty much any services you'd like. Listed below are the basic steps: First, pick a <homepageUrl> for your Accelerator. This is an valuable field—all the other URLs from the manifest ought to match its domain. Generally speaking, the top-level domain for your services is a superb choice. Example: <homepageUrl> Fill during the absolute path to your favicon into the <icon> field. One trick for undertaking so: right-click on the service page, view the source, and then search for an .ico file. Example: <icon> Under the <display> node, opt for a <name> that’s descriptive of your services,Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007, even though under 50 characters. We recommend that the name include the Accelerator category followed by the name of the service supplier. <display> <name>Act with Example.com<name> <display> Select a “category” attribute for that <activity> field. I have another publish on categories, but listed below are the ones we recommend: Weblog - A site service that creates a new weblog post based on a link or user-selection Bookmark - A services adds a link to the user's personal bookmarks around the internet Define - A services that provides definitions based on a selection Email - A service that provides email communication that can create a new email message Get - services that finds related material within the scope of the web site Map - A services that provides map locations based on user-selection Deliver - A services that converts world wide web data into application data Share – A service that shares a link (with optional comments) together with the website community or network Translate - A services that translates the present webpage or user-selection from an individual language to another Choosing a descriptive category is necessary for how Accelerators are grouped from the accelerator menu, and enables customers to understand what your Accelerator will do just before even experimenting with it. Determine which contexts you would like your Accelerator operate on—“selection”,Office 2010 Activation, “link”, andor “document”—and then add them as attributes to a single or more <ActivityAction> elements. For example: <activityAction context="selection"> … <activityAction> The link and document contexts could probably use somewhat added explanation. The link context is activated when a user right-clicks on a link and then executes an accelerator from the resulting context menu. Similarly, the document context is activated when the user right-clicks about the page itself and makes use of the context menu, or goes to the Page menu and executes something under the “All Accelerators” submenu. Next, fill with the “action” attribute of the <execute> component with the URL of the service you would like to use. See the section below regarding variables to find out how to pass info into your services. Example: <execute action=""> Preview windows really are a fantastic way of delivering the output of a services to end users as part of a extra inline browsing experience—it’s also an ideal way of enticing them to visit a service’s home page. It is possible to add a preview window via the <preview> factor. I’ve composed a section about preview beneath. Example: <preview action=""> The sections that follow provide some further in-depth specifics with regards to the techniques above. Variables IE exposes quite a lot of variables for use with Accelerators. Here’s a list of the most commonly used variables: selection - the user selection inside the webpage. Only to choose from in selection context. documentUrl - the URL of the webpage where the Accelerator is invoked. documentTitle - represents the title of the webpage where the Accelerator is invoked. link - the URL of the user chosen URL. linkText - the text of the user chosen URL. A full list of variables is out there here. You'll find two practices of passing these variables to a services as a result of an Accelerator. The initial is with the query string: <execute action=” The second is thru a person or much more <parameter> tags: <execute action=” <parameter name=”foo” value=”bar” > <execute> Notice that working with a <parameter> component is the only method to insert information into the body of the HTTP request. It is easy to use Post that has a parameterized query string,Windows 7 Ultimate, as properly, but any parameters you pass will show up from the URL. It is possible to specify a GET or Submit request via the “method” attribute of the <activityAction> component. Adding Preview Preview is probably the most visible characteristic of Accelerators, and a single of the most useful when implemented properly. Accelerator previews occupy a window of size 320x240 pixels. Given this, most Accelerators that use it formulate a special preview page for displaying it. The key to an efficient preview is returning the most relevant info possible based about the information and facts sent by the user, then creating sure it fits during the space provided by the preview window. The Bing Maps Accelerator, for example, maps the location of a chosen address by using its own UI, scaled down to 320x240: <preview method="get" action=""> <parameter name="b" value="selection" > <parameter name="clean" value="true" > <parameter name="w" value="320" > <parameter name="h" value="240" > <parameter name="client" value="ie" > <parameter name="format" value="full" > <preview> Note that you simply can pass variables to the preview window the same way it is easy to for execution. For example, the Accelerator above makes use of selection. Another handy rule of thumb is load time—if it takes your preview window takes a lot more than half a second to load, you probably have too very much in it, from a user experience perspective. One particular trick that you just might possibly uncover useful involves employing the mobile version of a services for a preview window. We deliberately sized the preview window to become compatible with mobile companies. Testing your Accelerator The moment you’re done constructing your Accelerator, it is time to test it out. We have a Javascript API for installation. Some code like the subsequent will construct a link that brings up the Accelerator installation dialog: <a href=”javascript:window.external.addService(‘myAcc elerator.xml’)”>Install me<a> In order for this to do the trick, you’ll need to have a live web site server—trying to open the link from a page on your local hard drive will result in an error. Any kind of local server will labor fine, though—you can use Visual Studio’s ASP.NET server without issue, for example. If everything goes nicely, you’ll see the usual Accelerator installation dialog. If it doesn’t, you’ll see something like this: Whenever I see this dialog, there are several blunders that quite frequently turn out to be the culprits. Encoded Characters The initially has to complete with XML itself. When dealing with query strings, it’s especially standard to pass in multiple arguments implementing the ampersand character. Unfortunately, this is a reserved character in XML, so making use of it as a literal in a query string will raise an error. Instead, you’ll ought to escape it with “&amp;”, like this: <execute action=” Matching Domain Requirement The second has to carry out using the <homepageUrl> tag. To adequately discover a services, we require that the URLs specified in <homepageUrl>, the action attribute of <execute>,Microsoft Office 2010 Professional Plus, and the action attribute of <preview> all share the same domain. If this isn’t the case, an error is raised. Test Cases After it is easy to install your Accelerator, you can get some scenarios you need to certainly test, since they tend to break to get a lot of the Accelerators already out there: Blank subject matter – what happens when blank information is sent to your service? Do you've gotten a graceful error message in put? Multi-line content – does your services handle line-breaks the way you believe it will? You may need to make sure you parse for your carriage return-line feed sequence (“%0d%0a” in URL encoding) and replace it with something appropriate, like a space. Script – Some user selection may have JavaScript associated with it. If you should specify HTML selection, then your services should certainly be filtering this script about the server for security reasons. Large selections – Accelerators truncate GET requests at 2048 characters. If you’d like your accelerator to get able to handle extra info, you may give some thought to utilising Submit. Next Strategies and Conclusion After you've a cool Accelerator created, feel free to upload it to the IE ##############. It’s an awesome way to gain further exposure for your Accelerator and your services. I wish this submit was effective in generating Accelerators. Should you have any feedback on this publish,Microsoft Office 2010, any thoughts on Accelerators in basic, or any cool creations you’d like to share, experience free to leave a comment. Thanks! Jon Seitel Program Manager