73432 - document contract IDs and CIDs and link to that document where needed

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Developer Documentation Graveyard :: Mozilla Platform, defect)

Description

[Axel Hecht]

Hi,
I tried to get the definite answer on "what's a contract ID?" once again,
and searching for "contract" and "id" or "contractid" yielded no result.
There was no obvious link on the xpcom pages as well. So I'm afraid there is
no documentation and no specification what contract IDs really are.

Right?

Axel

Comment 1

[Alex Fritze]

I remember that at some stage all PROG_IDs in Mozilla where renamed to 
CONTRACT_IDs.
According to Don Box:
"In addition to allowing implementations to be named by a CLSID, COM supports 
text-based aliases called programmatic IDs or ProgIDs. ProgIDs come in the form 
of libraryname.classname.version ..."
That's how CONTRACT_IDs are being used in Mozilla. But why were they renamed?

Comment 2

[Simon Lucy]

Attachment: List of ContractID changes, as at 12th September 2000

Comment 3

[Simon Lucy]

There was a long thread on xpcom about this in August-October 2000.  As a
summary and to give the progression of changing to ContractIDs [e-mail]
posted the following:-



>From now on, the names will be known as contractids.  This is to clarify
their purpose and desired use.  The supplier of a service registers
under the contractid(s) to promise behavior(s) which must be known to
the client and honored by the service to be useful.  The promised
behaviors include what interfaces have been supplied as well as
behavioral and parametric variations that do not affect the interfaces.


The contractid has a version number as a standard part of the id.  There
is no promise of backward-compatible behaviors from one version to
another, although a particular new contractid version's promised
behaviors may include all the behaviors of any or all previous
versions.  An implementation should register all versions of a
contractid it is able to fulfill so that requesters may recieve its
services.


The full syntax of the contract name (with no breaks):


@<internetdomain>/module[/submodule[...]];<version>
[?<name>=<value>[&<name>=<value>[...]]]


Attached find an incomplete list of the new contractid names derived
from the old progid names.


If you support code outside of the mozilla tree, you will have to change
PROGID to CONTRACTID wherever it occurs, and substitute the appropriate
new-syntax contractid values for the old ones.


This list may contain many unused values.  Eventually, it would be
desirable to document the contract represented by each of these id's.

Comment 4

[James Cox]

accepting QA for mozilla developer docs.

some of these bugs have been around for a _long_ time. Reporters, would you
please review the bugs, see if the issues have been resolved, and close bugs
appropriately.

I will do a full review of all bugs not touched in one week (8th April). 

Thanks.

</spam>

Comment 5

[Daniel Wang]

see
http://lxr.mozilla.org/mozilla/source/xpcom/doc/xpcom-code-faq.html#ContractID%20Vs%20CLSID

Comment 6

[Nickolay_Ponomarev]

The URL in comment 5 is now dead.

We pick an explanation of C[LS]ID and Contract ID, put it on MDC, and link to it from the pages mentioning CID/Contract ID.

Here's one of available explanations:
http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Creating_XPCOM_Components:An_Overview_of_XPCOM#XPCOM_Identifiers

Comment 7

[John Karahalis [:openjck]]

Automatically closing all bugs that have not been updated in a while. Please reopen if this is still important to you and has not yet been corrected.

Comment 8

[John Karahalis [:openjck]]

Reopening for review by Sheppy.

Comment 9

[Jean-Yves Perrier [:teoli]]

This is no longer in scope for MDN