12.10. Summary

After the presentation of component technology and how to lay out actions using XML, you have seen most of what KParts can do: three types of parts, part mainwindows, part manager, plug-ins, as well as how dynamic loading works—library factories and library loader.

You can do other interesting things with parts. Having a part embed itself in Konqueror is very simple; it's just a matter of providing a .desktop file for it, stating that it is a service that implements some servicetypes, which are the mimetypes that the part allows to view, plus the servicetype KParts::ReadOnlyPart. That's it. Konqueror will use the part to view the files of those mimetypes if no other service is set as more preferred in Configure File Types.

To provide better integration with Konqueror, you can also provide a KParts::BrowserExtension for the part, as defined in kparts/browserextension.h. This is what makes it possible to save and restore a view in Konqueror's history and for the part to use Konqueror's "standard actions." Examples of parts using the browser extension can be found in KView, KDVI, KGhostView, KWrite and all built-in Konqueror views.