xPL Project Wiki

About Vendor IDs

One of the components of the xPL Message Header is the Vendor ID - this is a text field with a maximum size of eight characters which tells us which vendor built a given application or hardware item. The Vendor ID is used in a variety of ways - for example, it is used by xPLHal and the xPLHal Manager to download a plugin file with settings for the device.

Vendor IDs are allocated in an informal way - a request should be posted at the xPL Forums (http://www.xpl-home.org/forums) in the Developers forum. It's helpful to give us an idea of what you are going to do with the ID, however, we are not that picky if you wnat to keep your development under wraps until it's ready!

Restrictions

As part of the xPL Protocol Spec, the Vendor ID can't be any longer than eight ASCII characters - in practice, we also won't issue Vendor IDs that are shorter than three characters long.

Vendor IDs can only consist of lower case letters - no symbols, hyphens etc.

Active Vendor IDs

A Vendor ID is considered Active if the vendor has:

• released any xPL enabled applications or hardware
• provided an XML Plugin file to describe their applications/hardware

Newly Approved Vendor IDs

Inactive Vendor IDs

A Vendor ID is considered inactive if the vendor has either:

• not released any xPL enabled applications or hardware
• not provided an XML Plugin file to describe their applications/hardware