Account

You can use existing configured on-line accounts and providers, and create new accounts of known types.

This feature is supported in mobile applications only.

The basic account management concepts are:

• Provider

  An on-line service provider entity, such as Google, Vodafone, or Facebook. A service provider is identified by its application ID. The account provider is registered while the application is installed. The information is used in the Add account screen in the device settings.

• Account

  An entity that collects all the data (such as user name, credentials, settings) needed for connecting to services. An account is always bound to a single provider and has a list of service instances bound to the account. The services can be individually enabled and disabled on the given account. For instance, "Laccount1@gmail.com" can identify a Google account, giving access to services, such as gmail, gtalk, Picasa, and Youtube, with each service having a separate service instance bound to the account.

Some of the account management features can be invoked only in account provider applications. Such applications have a specially prepared config.xml file with an account provider section:

<tizen:account multiple-account-support="true">
   <tizen:icon section="Account">icon.png</tizen:icon>
   <tizen:icon section="AccountSmall">icon.png</tizen:icon>
   <tizen:display-name xml:lang="en-gb">Test</tizen:display-name>
   <tizen:capability>http://tizen.org/account/capability/contact</tizen:capability>
</tizen:account>

If the application is registered as a provider, it is launched to authenticate the account. You must implement the appcontrol for the account provider. The following methods are available only in an account provider application: add(), remove(), and update().

The main features of the Account API include:

• Accessing accounts

  You can get a specific account or all available accounts.

• Accessing account providers

  You can get a specific provider or all available providers.

• Managing accounts

  You can add, update, and remove accounts.

• Monitoring account changes

  You can register a listener and track changes in the account database.

• Managing extended data

  You can set and get extended data for an account. The extended data is defined as key-value pairs.

The account provider application declares the account capabilities. The capability name is decided by the author of the account provider application, and must have an IRI form. For example:

• http://tizen.org/account/capability/contact is used when the account is related to contacts.
• http://tizen.org/account/capability/calendar is used when the account is related to the calendar.

To check whether this API is supported, use the tizen.systeminfo.getCapability() method and enable or disable code that needs this API, as needed. To guarantee that the account application runs on a device with the account feature, declare the http://tizen.org/feature/account feature requirement in the config.xml file.