Every now and then I have to look up a preference specifier in AIM in order to use it in a plugin.
For example, the other day I wanted to determine if the user has enabled the pushing of AIM Plugins to their buddy feed. I usually check in technote 10 on preferences in the AIM SDK technotes. However, you can also do this empirically in AIM with my CoreWitness plugin. All ‘aimcc.*’ preference changes will cause the OnPreferenceChanged event to fire on all listeners so you can simply make a change in the client to see what preference specifier is changing.
To make it easier, the latest version of my CoreWitness plugin lets you filter the messages being logged by pressing the * button in the title bar. To filter the log to just the OnPreferenceChanged event, open the filter dialog and proceed as follows. Click on the ‘clear all’ button and then start typing the word “preference” in the filter edit box until you see “OnPreferenceChange” appear in the list. Select this event and click OK. Here is a screen shot of this step:
After doing the above, I changed the ‘I have installed a new AIM Plugin’ check box in the privacy tab of AIM 6.9’s Settings and clicked apply. Here is a screen shot of my results:
As you can see the preference is called ‘aimcc.privacy.disclosePluginsToBuddyFeed’. Finding the preference specifier is only the beginning. I will cover how to read it in a future post.
NOTE: This will only work for aimcc.* preferences. So it is possible that you can make a change in the settings that does not get notified via OnPreferenceChange because it is internal to the client. Internal preferences are not available to pluigns at this time.
