Testing system events (shutdown/restart)

Question

Is anyone aware of a way to determine what event was sent to loginwindow to cause a system shutdown.. Im basically looking for a way to test for the events of kAELogOut
kAEShowRestartDialog
kAEShowShutdownDialog
kAERestart
kAEShutDown
as documented in http://developer.apple.com/documentation/MacOSX/Conceptual/BPSystemStartup/Artic les/BootProcess.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/20002130-114618-BAJGBJHI
thanks

Answer 1

You need to implement applicationShouldTerminate and the documentation is pretty explicit that your app doesn't get told who's asking it to quit but I'll assume you're up to speed on all that.
You would need to poll AppleEvent or the loginwindow process or come up with some other way of determining who's asking you. I've seen this solution - it isn't pretty but it's the kind of thing you'd need to think about doing.
http://myztik.katan.com/?p=176
I'm not aware of a way to use BSD level kqueue to get System event calls but that doesn't mean there isn't one. Even if it is possible it means your App would need to constantly deal with notifications you don't care about. Also keep in mind your applicationShouldTerminate will get called for every quit so there won't always be a Systemwide notification... it could just be the Application's Quit command.
HTH,
=Tod