Cooperating With Workspace Manager

dtksh provides access to all of the major Workspace Manager functions of the Dt libraries, including functions for querying and setting the set of workspaces with which an application is associated; for querying the list of all workspaces; for querying and setting the current workspace; and for requesting that an application be notified any time the user changes to a different workspace.

From a user's perspective, workspaces are identified by a set of names, but from the Workspace Manager's standpoint, workspaces are identified by X atoms. Whenever the shell script asks for a list of workspace identifiers, a string of X atoms is returned. If more than one X atom is present, then the list is comma-separated. The Workspace Manager expects that the shell script uses the same format when passing workspace identifiers back to it. During a given session, it is safe for the shell script to work with the X atoms, since they remain constant over the lifetime of the session. However, as was shown in the Session Manager shell script example in the previous section, if the shell script is going to save and restore workspace identifiers, the identifiers must be converted from their X atom representation to a string before they are saved. Then, when the session is restored, the shell script needs to remap the names into X atoms before passing the information on to the Workspace Manager. Mapping between X atoms and strings, and between strings and X atoms, is accomplished using the following two commands:

• XmInternAtom ATOM $DISPLAY $WORKSPACE_NAME false

• XmGetAtomName NAME $DISPLAY $ATOM

Specific dtksh commands for dealing with workspace management are documented in "Built-in libDt Session Management Commands" in Appendix A.