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Download Manager Architecture

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[The feature associated with this page, Windows Media Player SDK, is a legacy feature. It has been superseded by MediaPlayer. MediaPlayer has been optimized for Windows 10 and Windows 11. Microsoft strongly recommends that new code use MediaPlayer instead of Windows Media Player SDK, when possible. Microsoft suggests that existing code that uses the legacy APIs be rewritten to use the new APIs if possible.]

The Windows Media Player Download Manager uses COM technology. The functionality is distilled into a set of programming interfaces; you can write programming code that uses these interfaces by using Microsoft JScript or C++.

The scripting languages use the concept of objects to divide programming functionality. The DownloadManager object model uses several objects to divide the methods and properties into a logical organization that groups semantically related functions together. The following sections contain information about the Download Manager objects.

Section Description
About the DownloadManager Object The DownloadManager object represents the root object for the Windows Media Player Download Manager.
About the DownloadCollection Object The DownloadCollection object represents a collection of download items.
About the DownloadItem Object The DownloadItem object represents an individual download request.

 

About the DownloadManager Object

DownloadManager is the root object for the Windows Media Player Download Manager. All other objects are accessed through this object. To gain access to the DownloadManager object, use the following JScript syntax:

var DownloadManager = external.DownloadManager;

This creates an instance of the DownloadManager object, which can then be used to retrieve the child objects. For example, the following syntax retrieves the first item from the download collection that has id number 253675:

var firstItem = DownloadManager.getDownloadCollection(253675).item(0);

About the DownloadCollection Object

The DownloadCollection object represents a collection of files to be downloaded. You can use this object to determine how many downloads are in the collection, remove items from the collection, retrieve a specific download item, and to start a new download. Starting a new download automatically adds the download to the collection.

About the DownloadItem Object

The DownloadItem object represents an individual download. Download items always exist as part of a download collection. Use this object to retrieve information about the download item and to pause, resume, or cancel the download in progress.

When you cancel a download, the download item remains in place in its download collection. In this case, downloadCollection.downloadState retrieves a value of 4, meaning canceled.

You can use downloadItem.progress to inform the user about how much of the file has been transferred or how much remains to be downloaded. You might use this value to estimate the time remaining as well.

Download Manager