Adding Applications to Application Manager

When an application has been added to Application Manager, there is an icon in an application group that starts that application.

Many applications provide an application group. The application group is a directory at the top level of Application Manager that contains the application icon and other files related to the application.

Some applications may not have their own application group. Instead, the icon to start the application is located in a general application group. For example, you could create an empty application group named "Games" that you use as a container for all the games you install on the system.

Ways to Add Applications to Application Manager

There are two ways to add an application to Application Manager:

Registering the application
Adding an application icon without registering the application

Registering the Application

Application registration provides full application integration.

A registered application:

Has its own application group.
Has its desktop configuration files gathered under a single location. This group of desktop configuration files is called the registration package.
May have a registered help volume.

There are two ways an application can become registered:

When you install a desktop-smart application, registration occurs automatically. See “To Add a Desktop-Smart Application to Application Manager”.
An existing application can be registered by creating a registration package. See “To Register an Existing or Non-Desktop Smart Application”.

The use of a registration package makes the application easier to administer on the desktop. The registration package is created somewhere in the file system other than the locations used for desktop configuration files.

Adding the Application without Using a Registration Package.

This is the preferred way to add application when you want Application Manager to contain only an icon to start the application.

An application added without using a registration package:

May have its own application group, but usually has its icon placed in an existing application group
Has its desktop configuration files placed directly in locations along the desktop's search paths.

See “To Add an Application Icon to an Existing Application Group”.

To Add a Desktop-Smart Application to Application Manager

A desktop-smart application is an application that is automatically registered into Application Manager when the application is installed. The application's filesets include the registration package required by the desktop.

Install the application using instructions provided with the application.
When installation is complete, double-click Reload Applications in the Desktop_Tools application group.
Verify that installation is complete:
1. Open Application Manager and check for the presence of the new application group.
2. To open the application, open the application group and double-click the application's icon.

To Register an Existing or Non-Desktop Smart Application

This is the preferred way to fully integrate an application into the desktop.

The desktop provides a tool, dtappintegrate, that creates links between the registration package files and the directories on the desktop search path.

Desktop registration is explained in Chapter 4 “Registering an Application”

To Add an Application Icon to an Existing Application Group

This procedure explains how to add an application icon to an existing application group.

For example, the desktop provides an application group named System_Admin that has been reserved for various applications and scripts related to administering systems. If you have a script that users frequently run, you might want users to be able to run the script by double-clicking an icon in the System_Admin application group.

Use Create Action to create an action definition for the application.
For more information about Create Action, see Chapter 9 “Creating Actions and Data Types Using Create Action”
Create an executable file with the same name as the action name in the directory for the application group. The content of the file is irrelevant.
For example, if you've created an action named "Cleanup" that runs a system administration tool, you would create the executable file:
/etc/dt/appconfig/appmanager/language/System_Admin/Cleanup