C - Symbian Developer Network Public Wiki

C

C function
In Symbian OS, this refers to a function with a trailing C in its name (more normally with a trailing LC), for example NewLC(): such functions place a pointer to the object being worked upon onto the cleanup stack.
See also: leave, cleanup stack

C++
An industry standard object-oriented compiled language, formally standardized in 1998, but tracing its history to the early 1980s, with an heritage in C and Simula. C++ is a general-purpose programming language with a bias towards systems programming. C++ runs on most computers from the most powerful supercomputers to the ubiquitous personal computers. Symbian OS is written in C++.

call
A specific communication on a line. See RCall.
See also: call capabilities, call status, call ownership

call capabilities
Includes ability to support data, fax or voice calls, and the valid actions, for example to hang up.
See also: call

call ownership
When an ETel client makes or answers a call, it is said to have ownership of that call. Only the client with ownership can terminate the call or gain control of the underlying communications channel. All other clients may just monitor the call and view its state.
See also: call

call status
The status of a call, such as dialling, idle, and connection.
See also: call

cancel function
A function provided by an asynchronous service provider to cancel a service that has been requested.
See also: asynchronous service provider, request function, active object

caption
An application's caption is the text displayed below its icon, typically this is the application name.
See also: application, icon

Caribide.c++
Software development tool for C++ development on Symbian OS.

CDMA
Code Division Multiple Access: a digital wireless telephony transmission technique.

1. CDMA allows multiple frequencies to be used simultaneously (Spread Spectrum). The CDMA idea was originally developed for military use over 30 years ago.

2. The CDMA standards used for second-generation mobile telephony are the IS-95 standards championed by QUALCOMM.

cell broadcast
Cell Broadcast (CB) messaging is a mobile technology feature defined by the ETSI's GSM committee and is part of the GSM standard. It is also known as Short Message Service - Cell Broadcast (SMS-CB). Cell Broadcast is designed for simultaneous delivery of messages to multiple users in a specified area (source: Wikipedia).

cell identity code
The unique identifier for a particular cell in a mobile network.

cellular radio
The technology that has made large scale mobile telephony possible. Current cellular networks reuse the same radio frequencies by assigning them to cells far enough apart to reduce interference. A cell is the geographical area covered by one radio base station transmitting/receiving in the center. The size of each cell is determined by the terrain, transmission power, and forecasted number of users. Service coverage of a given area is based on an interlocking network of cells, called a cell system.

certificate
A public key together with some information that is collectively signed with a private key.

certification authority (CA)
An organisation that performs various functions in a PKI, including issuing digital certificates, supporting certificate revocation and revocation checking.

certification authority certificate
A certificate that is used for signing other certificates.

Certificate generator
A tool used to create a certificate request file, which is sent to a certification authority.

CF card
Compact Flash card. A storage medium for mobile devices.

CFR
Confirmation to Receive. A digital response confirming that the entire pre-message procedure for receiving a fax has been completed, and that message transmissions may commence.

character
The smallest recognised unit in the Symbian OS text model. Not always visible as text on the screen. For instance, includes page and line breaks, paragraph delimiters and picture characters.
See also: word, paragraph, picture character, paragraph delimiter

character cell
The rectangular array of pixels that wholly contains the shape of a character in a font (see character metrics).
See also: character cell metrics

character cell ascent
The number of pixels from the top of a character cell to the baseline.
See also: character cell, baseline

character cell descent
The number of pixels from the baseline to the bottom of a character cell.
See also: character cell, baseline

character cell height
The height of a character cell in a font definition, in pixels.
See also: character cell

character cell metrics
The ascent, descent, height and baseline measurements of character cell.
See also: character cell ascent, character cell descent, character cell height, baseline

character editor
A control which supports editing a single character.

character format attribute
Describes the appearance of characters; for instance font, font style and font size.
See also: format attribute

character format layer
A format layer specifying character format attributes.
See also: character, format layer, character format attribute

character justification
Full justification of text by adjusting the gaps between characters.
See also: word justification, justification

charge card
A pre-paid phone card.

check box
A control which may be used to toggle an application state.
See also: option button

child
A Message Server entry that belongs to another entry: for example, a message is a child of its folder.

chunk
An area of contiguous linear memory. It is the unit of memory allocation where a region of RAM is mapped into contiguous logical addresses. Chunks are allocated during boot for purposes such as the Kernel's data and stack.

CIG
Calling Subscriber Identification. An optional signal that indicates that the following fax frame is an identification of the calling station. Used to provide additional security to fax communications.
See also: CSI

circuit switching
Means of creating a connection by setting up a dedicated end-to-end circuit, which remains open for the duration of the communication.

CLDC
J2ME Connected Limited Device Configuration. The CLDC serves the market consisting of personal, mobile, connected information devices. This configuration includes some new classes designed specifically to fit the needs of small-footprint devices.

cleanup
The process of cleaning up after an exception or an error has occurred.
See also: leave, exception, cleanup stack

cleanup stack
The stack of partially constructed items maintained by CleanupStack::PushL() and CleanupStack::Pop(), which will be cleaned up, should a leave occur.
See also: Cleanup, trap harness, leave

client
A program which requests services from another program.
See also: server, asynchronous request

client interface function
A member function in a client-side session (or subsession) class which implement a specific message request to the server, using an operation code.
See also: client-side session, subsession, operation code

client subsession
The representation of a subsession in the client program. A client subsession has a corresponding subsession object in the server program.
See also: subsession, subsession object

Client-side MTM
A component that provides functions to a client for manipulation of message data for a particular messaging protocol.

client-side session
The representation of a session in the client.
See also: session

clipboard
A temporary stream store used to store text/pictures. Used in copying, cutting and pasting text.

clipping region
The region to which graphics primitives are clipped.
See also: region

clock alarm
A general type of alarm that can be set by users, and managed by the alarm server. The 8 clock alarms can be set by any session. However, once set, they are independent of the setting application.
See also: timed alarm, untimed alarm, orphan alarm, snoozed alarm, session alarm

codec
A codec is a device or program capable of performing encoding and decoding on a digital data stream or signal.

code section
A contiguous collection of character definitions covering part of the total character code range.

cold boot
The first time power is applied to a product, or a hard reset.

collate
The removal of differences between characters that are deemed unimportant for the purposes of ordering characters into their collating sequence.

column
In DBMS, this is considered to be a named member of a row.
See also: row, table

column set
A set of column definitions describing the structure of a table or rowset.
See also: table, rowset, column

command
A user operation or action on a device's screen that has a meaning to an application. Uikon allows commands to come from a number of sources, including toolbands, menu bars and hotkeys.
See also: user interface, application, hotkey, menu bar, toolband, toolbar

command button
A control which may be used to initiate a command in an application or to toggle an application state.
See also: latching command button

commit
Complete a transaction and ensure that all changes to the database are permanent.
See also: transaction, rollback

communicators
Information centric products with voice capability. In effect a fully featured personal digital assistant and mobile phone in one unit. The Nokia 9210 Communicator is an example of such a Symbian OS phone.
See also: Crystal

component
Part of a path, which indicates either a directory or a file. ORA collection of releasables from one source tree. Many components make up a ROM.
See also: path

component control
A control contained by a compound control.
See also: control, compound control

composition text
The text currently being composed by the user in a front-end processor.
See also: Front End Processor

compound control
A control which contains other controls. These controls are its components.
See also: control, component control

compound identifier
A set of three UIDs which, in combination, identify a Symbian OS object; encapsulated by a TUidType.
See also: UID type

concrete
Used to describe a class which implements the behaviour defined by an abstract class.
See also: abstract

concrete control
A class that is derived from CCoeControl and can be instantiated.

CONE
Abbreviation of Control Environment.
See also: control environment

connection element
A flag used by ETel to specify whether or not RLP is used.
See also: RLP

connectivity
Includes PC synchronisation and file transfer and Infrared beaming.

contact database
A database of contact items.
See also: contact item

contact group
A contact item that holds a set of associated contact cards or own cards.
See also: contact item, own card

contact item
Contains the details for a single contact.

contact item id
Uniquely identifies a contact item.
See also: contact item

container control
A compound control.
See also: compound control

content provider
A company that provides services to mobile phone users or network operators. These services could be shopping, web surfing, chat rooms, playing games, accessing data such as music and books through a server.

content type
For a field for a contact item, specifies a field's type, and optionally a vCard property to which the field type maps.
See also: field type, vCard

context
Environment, such as the thread or process, in which an operation is taking place.In Messaging, the entry with which a Client-side MTM or User Interface MTM is currently working.

context switch
A context switch is a switch in execution between one thread/process and another. This involves saving the currently executing thread process's context (that is, its address space mappings) and restoring the newly executing thread process's context.

context sensitive help (CS help)
Provides users with the specific help topic for the context to which it relates. CS help files are generated using the CS Help compiler, which replaces the Aleppo help authoring tool used in releases prior to and including v5.

control
A rectangular area of the screen that may respond to user input events.
See also: window, control environment

control environment
Provides an active-object interface to the window server's asynchronous services, and provides framework for controls and app UI.
See also: window server, control, app UI

control factory identifier
A value that identifies a particular control class to a factory object which can instantiate objects of that class.

control observer
A mixin protocol that allows a control to send events to another control.
See also: mixin protocol

controller
How the user changes the state of, or provides input to, a system.
See also: MVC

cosmetic animation
A style of animation used for controls like animated buttons or icons. Because the existence of the animation is optional, speed and quality may change. Cosmetic animation is the opposite of high dynamic content animation, which is used by camera and video applications.

CP1252
Code page 1252. The code page for the Windows variant of the Latin1 character set.

CPU Family
A class of CPU, for example the ARM7, ARM9 and StrongARM are all types of ARM CPU, so they belong to the ARM CPU family.

critical section
A Kernel object used to serialise access to a resource which may only be shared between the threads within a process. Access to the critical section is through an RCriticalSection handle.

crop
Eliminate unwanted portions of a picture when it is output. Cropping is done according to a set of margins.
See also: picture, scale, margins

CRP
(1) Command Repeat Procedure. This optional response indicates that the previous command was received by the fax machine in error, and should be repeated in its entirety.
(2) Content Rendering Plug-in. A combination of artwork provider and a Drawer. The CRP is loaded into a window server process for server-side rendering.
See also: certificate, certification authority (CA), digital certificate, digital signature, public/private key pair

cryptography
Public Key and Asymmetric - Public-key cryptography uses a pair of keys, one that is designated the private key and kept secret, the other key is called the public key and is generally made available. Information encrypted using one key can only be decrypted using the other, and vice versa. The implication of this is that if a message can be decrypted using the public key, then it must have been sent from the owner of the private key.

Crystal
Codename for a half-VGA screen size, keyboard-based UI variant that Symbian produced at v6.0.

CS help compiler
Builds help files from the command line, using information defined in a project file, rtf source file or files, and an optional customisation file. The compiler also generates a C++ header file containing literal descriptors for each context - which can be used to provide a link to the appropriate help topic from an application.

CSI
Called Subscriber Identification. Optional signal used to provide the specific identity of the called subscriber by its international telephone number.
See also: CIG

CSR
Certificate Signing Request: an unsigned certificate, used to create a valid certificate by signing it with the private key of a certificate authority.

CSY
Communications server. Symbian OS plug-in that provides a protocol module for the serial comms server. The name is derived from the term "Comms SYstem module" and always appears as the filename extension for such modules.