# Idle Inhibition Service Draft

Idle Inhibition Service 0.1 DRAFT
Bastien Nocera
GNOME core Developer

    					hadess@hadess.net

2012 The Idle Inhibition Service API Authors

## API Documentation

### Introduction

The Idle Inhibition Service API allows client applications to inhibit a user's login session from becoming idle.

The service is usually implemented by the session manager, or another daemon running inside the user's session, and communicating with the platform software to avoid becoming idle, and the consequences of becoming idle.

This API was designed by GNOME and KDE developers with the goal of having a common way to inhibit idleness.

### Consequences of idleness

Depending on the user session software running, idleness can have multiple consequences, including, but not limited to:

- Screen backlight dimming

- Screensaver animation replacing the desktop content

- Instant messenging client going to "auto-away"

- Computer suspending or hibernating

Inhibiting idleness is supposed to stop all those actions from taking place, specifically in response to idleness. A user action asking for any of those states would obviously be acted upon witout delay.

### API overview

Idle inhibition is achieved by the application calling an `Inhibit` method on a well-known D-Bus name.

Inhibition will stop when the `UnInhibit` method is called, or the application disconnects from the D-Bus session bus (which usually happens upon exit).

Implementations of this well-known bus name must have an object /org/freedesktop/ScreenSaver which implements the org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver interface.

### Design notes

The D-Bus service name, org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver, intentionally contains the word screensaver, as KDE implements the idle inhibition API in a screensaver sub-module. It was necessary for the specificed Idle Inhibition Service API to be compatible with this existing software.

KDE's implementation until kde-workspace 4.11.8 lived on the /ScreenSaver object, not on /org/freedesktop/ScreenSaver as described in this specification. This is fixed in later releases.

For the same reasons, inhibition of suspend, hibernation, or user-switching (amongst others) is not supported in the API.

## D-Bus API Reference

## References

kde-api

  KDE Screenlocker D-Bus API

gnome-impl

  GNOME org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver proxy implementation