Adding application and custom icons to the Xinet database for Xinet Portal

By default, out of respect for trademark registration, Xinet and Xinet Portal will use generic icons, as shown in Figure , to represent files created by specific applications, such as Adobe InDesign or Adobe Photoshop CS5, although the Xinet also ships with mechanisms to allow you to alter this behavior when you have licenses for these products.

Historically, administrators have been able to store Application Icons that they had the rights to use on the Xinet server in /var/adm/appletalk/icons/KASicondt* on Unix servers, by using the dtrebuild -xappicons command. This stored the icons in a DBM-style database maintained by ksd(1M), limited to 16 x 16 pixel and 32 x 32 pixel icons such as were supported by Mac OS 9.

Xinet Portal now relies, instead, upon a new appicons database within the Xinet MySQL database with the ability to store larger-than-32-pixel icons (up to 256 x 256 pixels), along with all the older icons previously maintained by ksd(1M) which will also be copied into the new database.

After the automatic creation of the appicons MySQL database table, dtrebuild -xappicons will store OS X Application Icons in both the old and new databases. In addition to the 16- and 32-pixel sizes, it will take the largest icons it can find out of an application and store them in the appicons MySQL table. Xinet Portal scales these new application icons down to whatever size the interface wants to present.

By default, Xinet Portal uses the 16 x 16 pixel icons in the upper left corner of Small View. The 32 x 32 pixel icon is used in the Navigation Bar, and the greater-than-32 pixel icon will be used in the center of Small View and Large View whenever a preview of the file doesn’t exist.

A Xinet utility, /usr/etc/venture/bin/iconadmin on Unix systems and C:\Program Files\Xinet\venture\bin\iconadmin on Windows systems, provides the ability to take an image and assign it as the icon in the Xinet appicons table so that it will be displayed for a given Type and Creator pair. The icons you assign for a specific Type and Creator can be images in any format supported by Xinet. When you use iconadmin, it only changes the MySQL database used by Xinet Portal, not the old DBM-style database which will continue to be used when viewing assets through Xinet without Xinet Portal.

If Xinet Portal discovers that the appicons database is missing, portalDI will run the command iconadmin -init to copy the old icon database from /var/adm/appletalk/icons/KASicondt* or C:\Program Files\Xinet\FullPress\Admin\icons\KASicondt* into the MySQL database and then run dtrebuild -xappicons MacFiles to also pick up any new, larger icons from MacFiles.

To assign icons that will be displayed in Xinet Portal:

Assign the icon to a TYPE CREATOR pair, using:

# iconadmin [-D] TYPE CREATOR path_to_image_file

• The -D option will provide debugging messages.

• You must repeat the command for each of the three icon sizes. If you only import one size into the appicons database, that one size will be used everywhere the icon appears.

• The image cannot be in the CMYK color space.

• If the image’s largest dimension exceeds 256 pixels, it will be scaled down to 256 pixels, the maximum allowed icon size. If an image’s maximum dimension is less than 32 pixels, it must be 16 pixels.

• You may employ iconadmin in this way to assign specific application icons according to the version of the application that was used to create a particular file. For example, you might use different icons for InDesign CS 3, CS 4 and CS 5 by specifying their difference in the TYPE and CREATOR pairs, i.e, InD IDd3, InD IDd4, and InD IDd5.

In most instances, it is sufficient to use the TYPE “APPL” to set one icon for a CREATOR, and it will be used regardless of the TYPE assigned to a given file.

[optional] Use the -read option, as follows, if you want to make sure you have been successful in your assignment:

# iconadmin [-D] -read TYPE CREATOR size > img.png

For 16- or 32-pixel icons, if you’ve been successful, iconadmin will produce a PNG on stdout representing the icon. If your size is larger than 32-pixels, iconadmin will show the largest icon available for the TYPE CREATOR. The command will fail, however, if icons don’t reside in the appicons database.