Application Services

Alarm Server

The AlarmServer is used to set alarms such as clock or calendar applications. The Alarm Server manages a queue of alarms and notifies the user in conjunction with other Application Framework components.

The AlarmServer maintains the queue of all system-wide alarms, this is known as Alarm handling. Session alarms are for a single session only and are completed when an alarm expires. Non session alarms occur if a session orphans its alarm by closing its connection to the AlarmServer.

Calendar Conversion

For applications that require Chinese date support calcon is a calendar conversion utility which provides conversion between Gregorian and Chinese Lunar calendar dates. The conversion is restricted to date conversion – time conversion is not supported. Corrections have been applied where Chinese lunar days are deemed to start at times other than midnight.

Julian dates are used for internal storage. A Julian date is a count of days from a point in time (defined as noon 24/11/4713 BC). Chinese Lunar calendar dates consist of:

• Year cycle

• Year (1-60)

• Month (1-12)

• Whether or not the month is a leap month

• Day in the month (1-29 or 1-30 in a leap month)

Help Model

Hlpmodel enables the user to search for specific information on a help database. Help databases contain rich text formatted data (including pictures) and metadata used to identify help information for searching.

The help launcher is a small DLL that allows the device-specific help application to be launched with a context sensitive identifier, so that a suitable help topic is displayed within the help application.

Time Zone Server

Time Zone Server provides functionality to convert between UTC times and local “wall-clock” times. It allows for Daylight Savings Time (DST) rules and adjusts local times accordingly. This functionality applies to both the current locale and other specified locales. It also applies to any time, historical or future (within a given range) at the specified locale

The application allows time conversion between UTC and local “wall-clock” time and automatic clock adjustment for daylight saving.

The Time Zone Compiler creates a Time Zone Database for Symbian from the Olson Tz database, which provides a collaborative compilation of information about the world's time zones.

Time Zone Localization

The Time Zone Localization component provides localisation support for time zone names. The component makes use of the standard Symbian resource framework for loading localizable strings. This allows licensees to provide localized time zone and city name strings for target markets.

Localizable text includes:

• Time zone ID, generated by the TzCompiler

• Time zone standard name

• Time zone daylight savings name

• Time zone short standard name

• Time zone short daylight savings name

Versit

The Versit component provides a set of classes that can be used by application or system developers to import and export data. The data is formatted according to a set of standards initially defined by the Versit consortium.

The plain-text formatted data can be included in emails, saved to disk or transferred from one application to another using streams. Two specifications have been published: vCard for the transmission of contact information and vCal for the transmission of calendaring information.

Although the information contained in contact data is different from that contained in calendar data, the basic formatting of the information follows the same style. It is this formatting style that has had a strong influence on the functional requirements of the Versit component.