Focus

[imilne]

The System plugin contains a screen with both a UiButtonList and a UiList. The buttons are to the left-hand side of the list (see image).

Either by design (or more likely luck), when the focus is on the buttons and user presses "Right", the focus moves to the list.

But when the list is empty of elements, I hide it from display, and restore the plugin's default view which is a custom rendering of drive-space remaining. The trouble is the hidden list still holds focus, so I'd like to return it to the buttons automatically - can this be done?

You can still get focus back by pressing "Left" but that's not particularly user-friendly.

Thanks

Iain

[bgowland]

Check if the list is empty and then fake a 'left' press by calling the key handler directly with the 'left' key code? Sorry been a while since I did plugin development and can't remember exactly but I faked key presses like this in the past.

[imilne]

Hmm, nice idea thanks, but I can't make it work consistently. I think the keyevent is (sometimes) getting lost deep within the event/render/threaded/blackmagic call stack that happens at runtime.

I'll keep fighting with it, but it's not looking hopeful. Wasn't really anything that important, but it would be nice to crack the bugger.

Iain

[sub]

Is this derived from SimpleButtonListPlugin? If so, you can probably do the following to select the buttons:

focus = Focus.FOCUS_ON_BUTTONS;
uiList.Selected = false;
uiButtonList.Selected = true;

[imilne]

Cheers sub. I can't make that work reliably either, so it must be something else silly I'm doing. I'll have a good think about it overnight and take a fresh attack at it in the morning.

Iain

[mvallevand]

I don't know if it helps but to make the button strip lose focus I think I need to use

uiButtonStrip.VisibleUntil = DateTime.MinValue;

Martin

[imilne]

Ok, I think I finally have something that is working.

The problem seems to be that although focus was being returned to the buttons, the screen wasn't updating itself to actually draw the focus. I was doing the check inside NeedsRendering, and asking for a redraw if necessary, but it looks like once just wasn't enough. So I changed the flag for the check from a bool to an int (set to 5) that gets decremented each time, causing a series of screen refreshes that seem to solve the problem.

Iain