Framework/Article/Implementation of the Dispatch API In SFX2

Implementation of the Dispatch API in SFX2

The Dispatch API as described in chapter 6.1.6 of the Developer's Guide is the backbone of our communication between "generic" UI elements and the document core implementations.

Traditionally SFX based components implemented this communication with a much older framework based on the so called slots and their organization into shells. While up to OpenOffice.org 1.1 our generic UI elements (menus, toolbars, etc.) still used the SFX based API directly to a large degree in OpenOffice.org 2.0 we changed this to using the Dispatch API exclusively, thus enabling us to share the UI components with other, not SFX based components. This paper describes how the old SFX implementation is matched to the DispatchProvider implementation that the component provides to the outside to make this happen.