Updating Dock icons


In one-to-one deployments, you may not have direct control of a user's Dock - especially if you do not use Macintosh Manager becuase you are using a non-Apple directory. When you update applications on a user's machine, this sometimes breaks Dock items. We faced this when updating machines from Office v.X to Office 2004. I wrote a script that ran at login that changed any existing Office v.X Dock icons into their corresponding Office 2004 icons.

The script is posted here in a quick tip I submitted to MacEnterprise.org. It's meant to be run by my LoginLauncher app (current version) (older version). I repost the script here as well:

#!/usr/bin/perl
# This script edits com.apple.dock.plist
# to remove Office X entries and replace them with
# Office 2004 entries.
#
#
# by Greg Neagle Jul 2004

$homedir = $ENV{'HOME'};

# is Office 2004 installed?
if (-d "/Applications/Microsoft Office 2004") {
   # has this script done its thing?
   if (!(-e "$homedir/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dock.plist.officex")) {
      open DOCKPREFS, "$homedir/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dock.plist"
         or die ("Cannot open $homedir/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dock.plist");
      open DOCKOUTPUT, ">$homedir/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dock.plist.new"
         or die ("Cannot open $homedir/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dock.plist.new for output");
      until (eof DOCKPREFS) {
         $text = readline(DOCKPREFS);
         print DOCKOUTPUT "$text";
         if ($text =~ "file-data") {
            $dictBlock = "";
            $officeAppFound = 0;
            while(!($text =~ "")) {
               $text = readline(DOCKPREFS);
               if ($text =~ "/Applications/Microsoft Office X/") {
                  # replace the path
                  $text =~ s/Microsoft Office X/Microsoft Office 2004/;
                  $officeAppFound = 1;
               }
               $dictBlock = $dictBlock . $text;
            }
            if ($officeAppFound) {
               # get rid of the _CFURLAliasData block
               $dictBlock =~ s|_CFURLAliasData.*||s
            }
            print DOCKOUTPUT "$dictBlock";
         }
      }
      close (DOCKOUTPUT);
      close (DOCKPREFS);

      #rename our files
      `mv $homedir/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dock.plist $homedir/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dock.plist.officex` ;
      `mv $homedir/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dock.plist.new $homedir/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dock.plist` ;

      # restart the Dock
      `killall Dock`;
   }
}
#END



The basic concepts here could be used to update other icons. The key points are that the path to the item is modified, and that the "CFURLAliasData" is removed. This needs to be removed because it is an alias that points to the old file item. The first time the user clicks on the icon after the update, this data is regenerated based on the pathname.

Posted: Sun - January 2, 2005 at 09:15 AM      

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