Reload Skin changes on Render

[psycik]

Hi

Have any of the developers figured out how to reload the skin file on each render.

This would be really useful while developing either skins and/or plugins. Make a change to skin file, and instead of having to reload, it just does it.

[Jeff]

Yes, I do this is the video archive and music player plug-ins. If you edit, for example, the list view skin.xml file, you will see that the plug-i adjusts in real time. I'll look at my code tonight and tell you what I did exactly, but as I recall the main thing was I just created a new skin helper in the render routine rather than just creating one in the activate like most examples do.

Jeff

[sub]

I was going to add something generic so I could force all instances of SkinHelper to drop and reload the settings, but some plugins seem to get things from skinhelper only once, and then cache them manually rather than using the cache in the skinhelper, which leads to problems.

Since there seems to be some interest in this sort of thing at the moment, I'll add it in for the next release.

[sub]

I'm also intending to write some guide lines on developing plugins so that things are done more consistantly:

- standard button names, so that a simple change to BaseSkin.xml changes the buttons everywhere
- how the skinhelper should be used so that caching works as expected
- how to get temporary bitmaps so that we can reduce the number of very large 720x480x4 bitmaps we currently have hanging around
- how to use the Inset window
- how to make sure strings are translateable.
etc...

[psycik]

All those ideas look good. I've only just started on the translatable stuff. But once you've got it, it gets quite easy to implement.

Jeff I managed to do it, but rather than reload all the time, I keep it's last update time so only reload when needed.

And since I've written a whole heap of generic screens (pop up boxes, lists etc) it was pretty easy to filter it down.

[Old Dog]

Yes, I do this is the video archive and music player plug-ins. If you edit, for example, the list view skin.xml file, you will see that the plug-i adjusts in real time. I'll look at my code tonight and tell you what I did exactly, but as I recall the main thing was I just created a new skin helper in the render routine rather than just creating one in the activate like most examples do.

Jeff

Okay, I'm very new to plugin coding, but I'm also very deep into it at the moment so I'll venture a guess...

There are three methods of interest here:

• The Constructor
  
• Activate
  
• Render
  

I'm guessing that the constructor is called once, Activate is called when the user presses the plugin's button on the main menu, and render is called several times while the plugin is visible.

In general, I'd reread the skin file within Activate.

Psycik's application is a special case, within Render is probably right for him.

Now if we really wanted to get fancy...

• make this code a separate method in the plugin
  
• have a commandline option for a skin development flag
  
• if the flag is set, the method is called within Render else Activate
  

-David

P.S. In fact this would be useful for plugin development too. I'm gonna try putting a flag inside my plugin tonight.