Specifications

A Switch configurator can NOT control an application that requires a different folder watched for
each configuration setup.
Preferably the third-party application and Switch should be able to settle on a watched folder
path without requiring user setup in the third-party application. The best way to achieve this
is to provide a mechanism that allows Switch to set the watched folder path at its discretion.
Failing that, the third-party application should document a mechanism for the configurator to
retrieve or otherwise determine the watched folder path.
Loadable library
Third-party functionality that is offered as a loadable library (DLL on Windows, Sylib on Mac) can
be accessed in a Switch configurator by providing an independent helper application. The helper
application calls the library functions and provides a simple interface towards Switch (usually
command line and/or console input/output).
Text encoding issues
On modern operating systems – including Windows XP and Mac OS X – file and folder names may
contain any Unicode code point (except for a few platform-specific separator characters). This is
true even if the default 8-bit code page is not able to represent these characters. For example,
on a regular English Windows XP system it is perfectly possible to have Greek or Cyrillic characters
in a filename, although these characters cannot be represented in the default Latin code page.
Switch is fully Unicode enabled and for optimal operation it requires a configured third-party
application to be Unicode enabled as well. In other words Switch requires that the third-party
application:
• Correctly works with filenames that may contain any Unicode code point.
• Performs all text communication with Switch using an appropriate and well-defined character
encoding (as explained in more detail below).
Command line on Mac OS X
Mac OS X uses UTF-8 as its default encoding for representing filenames/paths. In our experience,
a command line application can simply take a file path from the command line as an 8-bit string
and pass it through to a regular UNIX or Mac OS file system call even if the command line
application itself is not Unicode aware. Since the functions of the Switch Process class use UTF-8
to invoke command line applications, things will automatically work correctly.
Command line on Windows
On Windows the functions of the Switch Process class use Windows-specific Unicode-enabled
function calls to invoke command line applications. The command line application in turn MUST
invoke the Windows-specific Unicode-enabled function calls for retrieving the command line
AND for opening the files. For example, in C/C++ the command line application must use the
Unicode ("wide") version of the Windows-specific “GetCommandLine” function rather than the
argv[] argument in the main function (which only supports the current default code page).
Other text input/output
This includes the console input/output streams and any exchanged control files that may contain
plain text (as opposed to XML which has built-in Unicode support).
It is strongly recommended to use UTF-8 for all text input/output because this encoding can
represent any Unicode code point and it is upwards compatible with 7-bit ASCII in various ways
(for example, with regards to line breaks and null-terminators).
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