Device Location

  • Article

Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) is based on a dynamic network architecture, which allows devices to join and leave the network at any time. Because of this dynamic architecture, applications cannot rely on specific UPnP devices to be available at any given time. For this reason, UPnP applications (or control points) search the network to find devices that most closely match specified criteria. Applications also wait for device advertisement messages that indicate new devices have been added to the network.

The following list shows the valid search criteria for UPnP devices:

  • Device type
  • Service type
  • Unique device name (UDN)
  • All root devices

The device type and service type searches are typically used to find a class of devices with common characteristics. The unique device name search is used to find a specific device.

To search for devices, an application must first instantiate the Device Finder object. This object exposes the IUPnPDeviceFinder:IDispatch interface, using its methods perform the searches that have been previously described.

See Also

Control Point API | Device Finder Creation | Asynchronous Searching | Synchronous Searching | Device Collections Returned by Synchronous Searches

 Last updated on Saturday, April 10, 2004

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