LiveCode-Web-Launch

A sample app that will allow a LiveCode Standalone app to be launched using a custom protocol

Setting up a custom protocol to open an cloud based document in a local application from a browser using a URL

My goal is to have a URL to a document that a user can click and then a local standalone app will open and open the document that the URL points to. I also want to allow the user to click a document on the local machine and also have it launch the standalone app open the document.

I have only tried this on Mac OS X so far. I would also want to do this on Windows.

macOS

On macOS this is done by setting a ‘URL Types’ property in the macOS standalone app’s .plist file.

How does Zoom do it?

To figure out how this would be done I used Zoom for an example. I know that a url that opens the Zoom app has zoommtg as the custom protocol.

So in the browser there has to be the Protocol: zoommtg:// as well as a path: my/path/to/data

To test this out for a LiveCode app initially it tried different URIs I might use by adding them to the zoommtg:// protocol. So I tried some fake URIs to test.

I tried a path that ended with a file name:

zoommtg://my/path/mtg.lwl

And a URI with a Path and a parameter

zoommtg://subdomain.example.com/e5eda8db-6116-4a46-9c5b-28e61429fd54?pwd=wo894ur9jowijhf9iw3h4r9ihfw

I found both of these would launch the Zoom app.

Creating my own test LC App

Then I made an example app called LC Web Launch and I would use a protocol lcWebLaunch and set a file extension of .lwl in the standalone settings.

I wanted the URI to look something like this.

lcWebLaunch://subdomain.example.com/e5eda8db-6116-4a46-9c5b-28e61429fd54/mydocument.lwl?pwd=woen

So to have that URI launch the LC Web Launch standalone app I needed to edit the info.plist file of the Contents folder of its lcWebLaunch.app file

Standalone/MacOSX/lcWebLaunch.app/Contents/info.plist

How does Zoom do it?

To to see how I should set it up I looked in the Zoom info.plist for the zoommtg string which is the protocol the browser uses to open the Zoom App.

I found it in the key URLTypes

Information Property list URL Types Item 0 Document Role [Editor] URL identifier [com.zoom.video] URL schemes item 0 [zoommtg] item 1 [callto] item 2 [tel]

Adding the protocol to my own test LC App

I then opened the info.plist file of the standalone I created an added the following child to the key Information Property list.

Information Property list URL Types Item 0 URL identifier [LCWebLaunch]* URL schemes item 0 [LCWebLaunch]

I did not have a web url URL yet to put here so I just put LCWebLaunch for now. I just wanted to see if entering the protocol would launch my standalone.

After making the changes to my application I restarted the Mac. I had read somewhere that the Mac needs to register the App with its protocol. * (*I cant find my note with the URL - will find one and add it.)

Launching the app success!

Once I had the updated .plist file in the app pasting a URI in the browser that started the with the LCWebLaunch:// protocol would launch the LC Web Launch App

Getting the parameters and URL Path

*THIS IS A WORK IN PROGRESS

Opening the document on the local machine

*THIS IS A WORK IN PROGRESS

To get the path of a file that was clicked to open an app use appleEvent

LiveCode Forums :opening app by double-clicking Finder documents

In the above forum post I found the following code to get the file path of the document that is opening in the application by way of double clicking on it.

on appleEvent pClass, pID
  if pClass is "aevt" then  -- the 'core' class of apple events`
    if pID is "odoc" then`
      -- the user opened a file from the finder
      -- find out which file, and open it
      request appleEvent data
      put it into tFilePath
      MyOpenFile tFilePath
    else if pID is "pdoc" then
      -- the user printed a file from the finder
      -- find out which file, and print it
      request appleEvent data
      put it into tFilePath
      MyPrintFile tFilePath
    else
      pass appleEvent
    end if
 else
    pass appleEvent
  end if
end appleEvent