Palm OS Programming, 2nd Edition

Exchange

In this section, we discuss the Exchange Manager. First, we give you a general overview of Exchange, describe the UI, and offer you a few useful tips. Next, we provide a checklist that you can use to implement Exchange in an application. Last, we implement Exchange in the Sales application.

The Exchange Manager

The Exchange Manager is in charge of exchanging information between Palm OS devices and other devices. This manager was introduced in Palm OS 3.0 and is built on industry standards.

In Palm OS 3.0, the Exchange Manager works only over an infrared link (although it was designed to be extensible to other transports). It was enhanced in Palm OS 4.0 to work over other links (including via cell phone and Bluetooth). The Exchange Manager uses the ObEx Infrared Data Association (IrDA) standard to exchange information. As a result, it should be possible to exchange information between Palm OS devices and other devices that implement this ObEx standard.

Tip

For information on IrDA standards, see http://www.irda.org/standards/standards.asp. For Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME), see http://www.mindspring.com/~mgrand/mime.html or http://www.faqs.org/faqs/mail/mime-faq/. For information on Bluetooth, see http://www.bluetooth.com.

Overview of Sending

Applications that support this feature usually allow sending of either a single item or an entire category. Since infrared is so common, applications should also have separate menu items for beaming. When the user chooses ...