Location Framework IOCTLs
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8/28/2008
The Location Framework abstracts the underlying details of location plugins from applications. There may be scenarios, however, where an application needs to directly interact with a location plugin. An example is when the plugin needs the user's credentials and the name of a server so that it can retrieve data from a network.
Applications use the API LocationPluginOpen to open a communication channel to a plugin, LocationPluginIOCTL to send IOCTL commands, and LocationPluginClose to terminate a channel.** The corresponding calls that the Providers or Resolvers must implement in order to service the IOCTL calls are ProviderIoctlOpen(for providers) or ResolverIoctlOpen(for resolvers), ProviderIoctlCall/ResolverIoctlCall, and ProviderIoctlClose/ResolverIoctlClose.**
In general applications should not use and plugins should not require IOCTLs, as this breaks the abstraction layer. Plugins should read their configuration from the registry and use the CredRead/CredWrite APIs in order to get and set sensitive credential information.
See Also
Concepts
Location Framework Architecture
Location Framework Architecture Diagram