Dynamic DrawText in skin vs. DrawString in code

[Spartan]

All, I am playing around with developing my own system information plugin. Here is what I have thus far:



The problem I am having is making it flexible in terms of skinning. Right now I am using a CompositeImage along with a DrawRoundedRect to draw the rectangle around the drive information -- this part is in the skin.

However, in the code, I have it set to enumerate the drives and their status using absolute positioning. I am using DrawString and DrawRoundRect (from the original sysinfo plugin) to accomplish this.

The problem is that the skin can't know how many drives there are.

To rectify this, I was thinking of manually parsing the skin.xml file and adding my own nodes prior to calling the SkinHelper constructor. At least then, the dynamically created nodes would be relative to the parent CompositeImage/DrawRoundedRect.

Any other ideas?

[Jeff]

Lots of plug-ins have lists that are vary in size, incldiung recording lists, music lists, tv guide, weather, etc. Typically these are handled in the skin by setting the position of the first item, an image for a list item, and a spacing paramter between items. Your code would then handle the drawing of the items by moving each list item down by the proper spacing. The weather plug-in has an example of this in the skin file and code for the extended forecast.

Jeff

[Spartan]

Lots of plug-ins have lists that are vary in size, incldiung recording lists, music lists, tv guide, weather, etc. Typically these are handled in the skin by setting the position of the first item, an image for a list item, and a spacing paramter between items. Your code would then handle the drawing of the items by moving each list item down by the proper spacing. The weather plug-in has an example of this in the skin file and code for the extended forecast.

Jeff

Nice -- I knew there had to be examples of this somewhere, I just couldn't think of any. :o Does that pattern also handle "scrollable lists"?

[Jeff]

No, it does not. However, the example posted at http://gbpvr.com/pmwiki/uploads/Developm...eleton.zip does.

Jeff

[jorm]

cool plugin other useful info would be

displaying the status of each tuner card.
and the number of days of epg.

[Spartan]

cool plugin other useful info would be

displaying the status of each tuner card.
and the number of days of epg.

Right -- time permitting I will do something like that.

Originally I had started looking at the other new SystemInfo plugin out there (which does list the EPG data), but since it was written in VB.net (which I absolutely cannot stand), I decided to hack up the archaic sysinfo plug-in (C#) from about a year ago.

My main goal was to have a screen where I could view the status of my hard drives graphically on a single page.

[psycik]

Jorm, my plugin shows information on the EPG content...just not all the drive information that Spartan has - http://forums.nextpvr.com/showthread.php?t=9320

There were 2 releases so ge the second one.

[psycik]

Spartan, forgive me for writing in VB.net. It was my first, and VB is much more native to me.

You'll be pleased to know that any of my subsequent plugins shall be C#.

Maybe I should recode that one.....