Using the bar-descriptor.xml file

General page

This page shows the content that's applicable to all build configurations for a project.

Application page

This page maintains the attributes for the application entry point. Because you can localize the entry point name, description, icon, and splash image, they appear in a detail view that's determined by your language selection on the Localization page.

This page also allows you to specify permissions that are required for accessing certain features on the device, such as the camera or file system. To learn about the permissions that you can specify, see App permissions.

Assets page

This page lets you manage the assets packaged in the application's .bar file. Assets can be configuration-specific, meaning that each different build configuration (Device-Debug, Device-Release, Simulator-Debug) can use a unique set of assets. Using the Assets page to manage assets is not a flexible as the Source editor because:

• The primary purpose of build configurations is the packaging of different variants of the application code and/or data assets, such as for debugging or for different target architectures. Other application metadata, such as the name, icon, window characteristics, permissions, and other entry-point attributes, are configuration-independent.
• When you require specific configuration details, the Source page provides full access to the bar-descriptor.xml file. The Assets page might not include configuration-specific data; in this case the page heading displays warning annotations to indicate this.

Localization page

This page shows the options for localization support.

When you click Add, the Add Localizations drop-down list includes all of the locales supported by the BlackBerry 10 OS. The simplest mode of operation is one that is untranslated, in which you type the name, description, or image asset path without selecting a language. In the bar-descriptor.xml file, this generates an element such as <name> that contains a single string. For translated content, you specify the text or asset for each language annotated by the language code. The result in the bar-descriptor.xml file looks like the following for US English and German:

 <name>
<text xml:lang="en_US">...</text>
<text xml:lang="de_DE">...</text>
</name> 

Source page

This page provides a text editor to access the contents of the bar-descriptor.xml file for advanced editing purposes. You can copy and paste options from external sources, and access elements that aren't displayed on the General, Application, Assets, and Localization pages (such as comments).

This page offers syntax highlighting, content assist (based on the XML schema), validation, and problem markers and annotations. Changes made on the Source page are automatically updated in the contents of the other pages. In addition, changes made on the General, Application, and Asset pages are also immediately reflected on the Source page.