Machine Property Icons

Machine property windows are used to display the properties of an inventoried object. The properties are organized into groups, and the groups contain attributes. The user can view the attributes by group by selecting the group to view in the Properties pane—the attributes for the group are then displayed in the right pane. Each group has a graphic that represents that particular group within that particular architecture.

Using a resource-only DLL, you can override the graphics for existing groups or add graphics for new types of groups. If a new group is added to the SMS inventory and no resource-only DLL is provided, the default graphic is displayed.

    To override or add a group icon

1. Create an icon for the group.
2. In the resource script for the DLL, add the bitmap by using the following formats:

   PDG_SystemType_GroupName

   Use the icon of the group for the specific system type.

   PDG_architecture_GroupName

   Use the icon of the group for the specific architecture.

   PDG_Std_GroupName

   Use the general icon for the group.

   where architecture is the name of the object's architecture, SystemType is the value for the SystemType attribute in the Identification group, and GroupName is the name of the group in the Property Display table.

   Important In an architecture, SystemType, or GroupName name, you must replace any spaces with an underscore character. For example, the Personal Computer architecture should be specified as Personal_Computer.

   The SMS Administrator will search first for a bitmap named according to format 1. If a bitmap resource of this name cannot be found in any of the registered resource-only DLLs, the SMS Administrator searches for a bitmap named according to format 2. If no bitmap using format 2 is found, it searches for a bitmap using format 3. If this bitmap resource cannot be found, the default bitmap is displayed.

   Note that the SMS Administrator attempts to load an icon by starting from a very specific format and ending with the broadest format.

For example, the SMS Administrator application resource contains the following icon resource for the Keyboard property group:

PDG_Std_Keyboard  ICON  keyboard.ico

If you wanted objects of the Personal Computer architecture to have a different keyboard icon, you could provide the following icon resource:

PDG_Personal_Computer_Keyboard  ICON  pckybrd.ico

Furthermore, if you wanted all Personal Computer objects (except for members of the Macintosh SystemType) to have the same icon, you could also provide the following icon resource:

PDG_Macintosh_Keyboard  ICON  mackybrd.ico