Desktop Entry Daemon

Desktop Entry Daemon is a userspace DBus API and daemon to manage desktop entries. This could be expanded later to include a system-level component, but the current scope is just for userspace applications.

The current resources a client may register with desktop-entry-daemon:

Lifetimes

There are 3 lifetimes for a resource in desktop-entry-daemon:

  • Process - Resources in this lifetime will be cleared when the calling process exits
  • Session - Resources in this lifetime will be cleared when the session is restarted OR when the daemon restarts
  • Persistent - Resources in this lifetime are persistent across reboots and won't be deleted unless explicitly called to do so.

The default directories for these lifetimes are:

  • Process - /run/user/$UID/desktop-entry-daemon/process/
  • Session - /run/user/$UID/desktop-entry-daemon/session/
  • Persistent - $HOME/.cache/desktop-entry-daemon/

Using the DBus API

The up-to-date XML interface for the API can be found here.

The DBus interface can be found at the name io.ryanabx.DesktopEntry at the path /io/ryanabx/DesktopEntry.

Example 1 - Entry/Icon for the Process Lifetime

Let's say you are a client and you'd like to register a temporary desktop entry and icon for yourself while you're running. In this case, you'd want to use the Process lifetime, so that when your application exits, the entry is removed.

Call the DBus API function NewProcessEntry with a string for your application ID appid and the plain text of the desktop entry entry. The daemon will track the calling process until the process exits, and then delete the entry. You may also call the function NewProcessIcon to register an icon with the name name and the raw data for the icon data.

Example 2 - Registering an SVG Icon

Lets say you'd like to register a scalable icon for an app or other purpose. Let's say you'd like the icon to be cleared after the session exits, so you'd use the Session lifetime. Call NewSessionIcon with a name of your choice and some SVG text data encoded into UTF-8.

NOTE: Session-level and Persistent-level resources have an extra argument owner which is a string of your choice that identifies that you own the resource. You may use this string later on if you'd like to force-remove the data you've stored.

Contributing

This API is open and welcome to community contributions! Please make an issue describing what you'd like to work on, to avoid duplicate work, then make a PR!