Trying to understand skins

[mkenyon2]

I'm creating a basic plugin that lists several items. Let's say 5.

I want the unselected items to only show one field:
<DrawText text="@name" loc="3,5" size="90,20" textStyle="GeneralTextHeaderStyle" align="Left"/>

But I want the selected items to show 3 fields:
<CompositeImage name="DetailsViewSelectedInactiveItem" size="80,28">
<DrawCommonImage name="DetailsViewSelectedInactiveItemBackground"/>
<DrawText text="@name" loc="3,5" size="90,20" textStyle="GeneralTextHeaderStyle" align="Left"/>
<DrawText text="@summary" loc="3,35" size="90,45" textStyle="GeneralTextStyle" align="Left"/>
<DrawText text="@airDate" loc="3,80" size="90,15" textStyle="GeneralTextStyle" align="Left"/>

Here's my placements
<Placements>
<Placement name="ListBackground" loc="0,0"/>
<Placement name="DetailsView" loc="25,10" size="75,10" spacing="10.0" rows="4"/>
<Placement name="NoItemsMessage" loc="25,15"/>
</Placements>


Can I do that?

[psycik]

Probably not. What you normally do is construct the list, and then basically give it to one of sub's UI items (the list) and he does the drawing/key processing within the list.

You could do something like selected pass all information, and unselected pass only the field you want and blank the others, but you'd have to re-construct the list completely whenever you changed the selected item, which is not great on processing/memory.

The only other way is to roll your own list class and handle all the drawing/animation etc yourself...