Bellhop Help

Publishing Services

Once you've configured your services, you can publish them easily using the Settings inspector. There's an Active checkbox in the inspector that controls whether or not a service is available in the Services menu. If you enable the checkbox, your service is automatically added to the Services menu. You can also manually rebuild the Services menu by selecting Bellhop > Rebuild Services Menu from the Bellhop menu.

You can find your service by looking for a submenu under the Services menu whose name is the name of the collection to which the service belongs. Under that submenu you should see a menu item whose label matches the label of your service. The figure below shows a sample Services menu from the TextMate application. The selected service's label is Format - Make Uppercase and it belongs to the collection named Bellhop Text.



Services menu within TextMate

It is possible that not all services in the database are displayed in the menu. There are a couple of reasons why this might happen. Some of the services in the database might not be marked as "active", meaning that they would not be available in the Services menu. Secondly, the Services menu is constantly updated so that only those services that can act on data that the requesting application (e.g. TextMate) is able to provide are actually displayed in the menu.