A D-Bus service which allows connections to be created. The manager processes are intended to be started by D-Bus service activation.

For service discovery, each Telepathy connection manager must have a connection manager name (see Connection_Manager_Name for syntax).

The connection manager must then provide a well-known bus name of org.freedesktop.Telepathy.ConnectionManager.cmname where cmname is its connection manager name. If it makes sense to start the connection manager using D-Bus service activation, it must register that well-known name for service activation by installing a .service file.

Clients can list the running connection managers by calling the ListNames method on the D-Bus daemon's org.freedesktop.DBus interface and looking for names matching the above pattern; they can list the activatable connection managers by calling ListActivatableNames, and they should usually combine the two lists to get a complete list of running or activatable connection managers.

When the connection manager is running, it must have an object implementing the ConnectionManager interface at the object path /org/freedesktop/Telepathy/ConnectionManager/cmname.

Connection managers' capabilities can be determined dynamically by calling their ListProtocols method, then for each protocol of interest, calling GetParameters to discover the required and optional parameters. However, since it is inefficient to activate all possible connection managers on the system just to find out what they can do, there is a standard mechanism to store static information about CMs in ".manager files".

To look up a connection manager's supported protocols, clients should search the data directories specified by the freedesktop.org XDG Base Directory Specification ($XDG_DATA_HOME, defaulting to $HOME/.local/share if unset, followed by colon-separated paths from $XDG_DATA_DIRS, defaulting to /usr/local/share:/usr/share if unset) for the first file named telepathy/managers/cmname.manager that can be read without error. This file has the same syntax as a freedesktop.org Desktop Entry file.

Clients must still support connection managers for which no .manager file can be found, which they can do by activating the connection manager and calling its methods; the .manager file is merely an optimization. Connection managers whose list of protocols can change at any time (for instance, via a plugin architecture) should not install a .manager file.

For each protocol name proto that would be returned by ListProtocols, the .manager file contains a group headed [Protocol proto]. For each parameter p that would be returned by GetParameters(proto), the .manager file contains a key param-p with a value consisting of a D-Bus signature (a single complete type), optionally followed by a space and a space-separated list of flags. The supported flags are:

• required, corresponding to Conn_Mgr_Param_Flag_Required
• register, corresponding to Conn_Mgr_Param_Flag_Register
• secret, corresponding to Conn_Mgr_Param_Flag_Secret
• dbus-property, corresponding to Conn_Mgr_Param_Flag_DBus_Property

The group may also contain a key default-p whose value is a string form of the default value for the parameter. If this key exists, it sets the default, and also sets the flag Conn_Mgr_Param_Flag_Has_Default. The default value is formatted according to the D-Bus signature as follows:

s (string)

The UTF-8 string, with the standard backslash escape sequences supported by the Desktop Entry Specification (the "localestring" type from the Desktop Entry Specification)

o (object path)

The object path as an ASCII string

b (boolean)

"true" (case-insensitively) or "1" means True, "false" (case-insensitively) or "0" means False; when writing a file, "true" and "false" SHOULD be used

y, q, u, t (8-, 16-, 32-, 64-bit unsigned integer)

ASCII decimal integer

n, i, x (16-, 32-, 64-bit signed integer)

ASCII decimal integer, optionally prefixed with "-"

d (double-precision floating point)

ASCII decimal number

as (array of string)

A sequence of UTF-8 strings each followed by a semicolon, with any semicolons they contain escaped with a backslash (the "localestrings" type from the Desktop Entry Specification)

Currently, no other D-Bus signatures are allowed to have default values, but clients parsing the .manager file MUST ignore defaults that they cannot parse, and treat them as if the default-p key was not present at all.

It is not required that a connection manager be able to support multiple protocols, or even multiple connections. When a connection is made, a service name where the connection object can be found is returned. A manager which can only make one connection may then remove itself from its well-known bus name, causing a new connection manager to be activated when somebody attempts to make a new connection.