Windows 7 Key Accelerator Creation Guide - IEBlog

Introduction There are tons of in reality cool solutions in existence, and I think quite a bit of them would match in really nicely with Accelerators. But while there is plenty of worth to become had in setting up Accelerators Office 2007 Activation Key, I really do not believe we’ve at any time had a blog site post explaining a step-by-step practice for how to do it. I’m hoping this publish will assist with that. I’ve been functioning on the element for a whilst, so I’ve arrive up with some strategies and top practices which have helped me become alot more successful in putting together Accelerators. There's also a couple of blunders I’ve seen (and crafted!) over and over yet again, so I’ll speak about people within the desire of generating the progress operation somewhat simpler for everybody else to choose from. Generating an Accelerator Accelerators streamline the common copy-navigate-paste operation by enabling end users to deliver selected written content from the recent webpage to one particular of their favourite services. Fortunately, although the characteristic is quite powerful, it’s in reality really quite easy to compose code that makes use of it. Here’s a step-by-step guide for designing a simple Accelerator. 1st, I’ve put up an Accelerator template, with sample information and facts pre-loaded. All you ought to do is swap out the sample knowledge for yours. Note that you simply really do not should be the services supplier to develop an accelerator that interacts which has a services. If you're able to identify the subsequent important information, then you can establish an accelerator for pretty much any services you desire. Allow me to share the techniques: To start with, pick out a <homepageUrl> for your Accelerator. This is an imperative field—all the other URLs within the manifest must match its domain. Generally speaking, the top-level domain for your service is an effective choice. Example: <homepageUrl> Fill in the absolute path to your favicon into the <icon> field. One particular trick for doing so: right-click around the services page, view the source, and then search for an .ico file. Example: <icon> Under the <display> node, find a <name> that’s descriptive of your services, though under 50 characters. We recommend that the name include the Accelerator category followed by the name of the services supplier. <display> <name>Act with Example.com<name> <display> Decide on a “category” attribute for the <activity> field. I have another post on categories, but allow me to share the ones we recommend: Website - A blog site service that creates a new blogging site post based on a link or user-selection Bookmark - A service adds a link to the user's personal bookmarks around the web Define - A service that provides definitions based on a selection Email - A services that provides email communication that can develop a new email message Obtain - services that finds related subject material within the scope of the blog Map - A service that provides map locations based on user-selection Send - A service that converts web information into application data Share – A services that shares a link (with optional comments) along with the web-site community or network Translate - A services that translates the present webpage or user-selection from 1 language to another Choosing a descriptive category is important for how Accelerators are grouped inside accelerator menu, and enables consumers to understand what your Accelerator will do previous to even experimenting with it. Select which contexts you wish your Accelerator operate on—“selection”, “link”, andor “document”—and then add them as attributes to an individual or more <ActivityAction> elements. For example: <activityAction context="selection"> … <activityAction> The link and document contexts could probably use a touch more explanation. The link context is activated when a user right-clicks on a link and then executes an accelerator through the resulting context menu. Similarly, the document context is activated when the user right-clicks on the page itself and uses the context menu, or goes to the Page menu and executes something under the “All Accelerators” submenu. Next, fill inside the “action” attribute of the <execute> factor with all the URL of the service you'd like to use. See the section under regarding variables to find out learn how to pass data into your service. Example: <execute action=""> Preview windows are a good way of delivering the output of a service to consumers as part of a alot more inline browsing experience—it’s also an ideal way of enticing them to visit a service’s home page. You're able to add a preview window via the <preview> component. I’ve composed a section about preview below. Example: <preview action=""> The sections that follow provide some extra in-depth specifics regarding the steps above. Variables IE exposes many different variables for use with Accelerators. Here’s a list of the most commonly used variables: selection - the user selection inside the webpage. Only attainable 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 selected URL. linkText - the text of the user chosen URL. A full list of variables is offered right here. There are two tactics of passing these variables to a service by an Accelerator. The first is with the query string: <execute action=” The second is by one particular or a great deal more <parameter> tags: <execute action=” <parameter name=”foo” value=”bar” > <execute> Notice that using a <parameter> aspect is the only technique to insert data into the body of the HTTP request. You can actually use Post using a parameterized query string, as very well, but any parameters you pass will show up during the URL. You can actually specify a GET or Post request via the “method” attribute of the <activityAction> factor. Adding Preview Preview is probably the most visible function of Accelerators Windows 7 Key, and a single of the most useful when implemented successfully. Accelerator previews occupy a window of size 320x240 pixels. Given this Office 2010 Home And Business Key, most Accelerators that use it build a special preview page for displaying it. The key to an productive preview is returning the most relevant details possible based about the facts sent by the user, then creating sure it fits within the space provided by the preview window. The Bing Maps Accelerator, for example Office 2007 Product Key, maps the location of a chosen address utilizing 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> Be aware you can pass variables to the preview window the same way you’re able to for execution. For example, the Accelerator above employs selection. Another handy rule of thumb is load time—if it takes your preview window takes additional than half a second to load, you probably have too a lot in it, from a user experience perspective. An individual trick that you simply may possibly identify useful involves using the mobile version of a services for any preview window. We deliberately sized the preview window to get compatible with mobile services. Testing your Accelerator Once you’re done constructing your Accelerator, it is time to test it out. We have a Javascript API for installation. Some code like the following will establish 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 perform, you’ll need to have a live internet 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 operate fine, though—you can use Visual Studio’s ASP.NET server without issue, for example. If everything goes nicely, you’ll see the common Accelerator installation dialog. If it doesn’t, you’ll see something like this: Whenever I see this dialog, you can find several faults that incredibly frequently flip out to be the culprits. Encoded Characters The very first has to do with XML itself. When dealing with query strings, it is rather widespread to pass in multiple arguments utilising 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 really need to escape it with “&amp;”, like this: <execute action=” Matching Domain Requirement The second has to carry out along with the <homepageUrl> tag. To accurately recognize a services Office 2010 Professional Key, we require that the URLs specified in <homepageUrl>, the action attribute of <execute>, and the action attribute of <preview> all share the same domain. If this isn’t the case, an error is raised. Test Cases As soon as you’re able to install your Accelerator, there's several scenarios you should certainly test, since they tend to break for a good deal of the Accelerators already out there: Blank content – what happens when blank subject matter is sent to your services? Do you have a graceful error message in area? Multi-line subject matter – does your services handle line-breaks the way you feel it will? You may wish 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 ever specify HTML selection, then your service have to 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 be able to handle additional information, you might think of by using Publish. Next Techniques and Conclusion Once you've got a cool Accelerator made, feel free to upload it to the IE ##############. It is an awesome strategy to gain much more exposure for your Accelerator and your services. I wish this publish was advantageous in generating Accelerators. In case you have any feedback on this publish, any thoughts on Accelerators in common, or any cool creations you’d like to share, experience free to leave a comment. Thanks! Jon Seitel Program Manager