Some skinning questions

[kraqh3d]

i've done some basic skinning to rearrange some buttons, change the size of the albums covers, etc. now i want to understand how the controls actually work so i can play around and make some more modifications.

images and hyperlinks make sense to me. what i dont fully understand are the other controls. so i have these questions that i hope either you skin guru's or the godly dev's can answer

do buttons (that are not hyperlinks) get their actions based off their label field? if so, how do the ones in home.xml work for the shutdown, reboot, etc controls? they have a blank label.

how do the automated label controls work? and how are they differentiated from each other if there are more than one on a page? (an example of such a page is the dialogvideoinfo.xml)

in the musicoverlay.xml is there anyway to get access to the song title, artist info, etc without the use of a fadelabel? i would like for the information to be displayed individually as seperate static labels.

is there anyway the albums listcontrol from mymusicalbums.xml be applied to listcontrols in other pages? i kind of want to convert a thumbpanel into more of a listcontrol. the thumbpanel is nice, but you cant read any of the video titles or album names because the text field is so tiny. and the listcontrol has nice long text fields, but dont display icons (and if they did, they would be really tiny.)

and finally what is the musicvisualization.xml file used for?

[bobrooney_78]

Originally Posted by (kraqh3d @ june 06 2004,08:40)

do buttons (that are not hyperlinks) get their actions based off their label field? *

>> they geht their actions based on their "hyperlink" or "id" field


in the musicoverlay.xml is there anyway to get access to the song title, artist info, etc without the use of a fadelabel?

>> i think no.

is there anyway the albums listcontrol from mymusicalbums.xml be applied to listcontrols in other pages? *i kind of want to convert a thumbpanel into more of a listcontrol. *the thumbpanel is nice, but you cant read any of the video titles or album names because the text field is so tiny. *and the listcontrol has nice long text fields, but dont display icons (and if they did, they would be really tiny.)

>> yeah, an enhanced listcontrol with thumbs would be great - but i think at the moment it isn't possible.

bob

[kraqh3d]

thanks for info. skinning.txt doc doesnt really explain the whole id tag concept. (other than saying "this should be unique within this file"). i thought it was only to mark each control so the onup, ondown, onleft, onright tags can determine what control gets focus next.

so, if the id tag is controlling the action of the control, then shouldnt each "action" have a unique id? i'd expect the "number of files" control to have the same id in each xml, but thats not the case.

and if the action id's are specific within each windowid, is there a list somewhere that maps them out?

[bobrooney_78]

Originally Posted by (kraqh3d @ june 06 2004,16:18)

so, if the id tag is controlling the action of the control, then shouldnt each "action" have a unique id? *i'd expect the "number of files" control to have the same id in each xml, but thats not the case.

i asked me the same questions for some time, i ended up playing around with existing skins - trial & error.

the answer lies in the c-source code, there is no other documentation beside the skinning.txt

[kraqh3d]

i've been doing the same thing, but it doesnt make sense. *its like something is missing. *there should be some tag in the control which ties the control to an action.

edit... i've been looking through the source code and found them...

here's an example from xbmc/xbmc/guiwindowmusicsongs.cpp. these correspond to the control id's in mymusicsongs.xml.

#define control_btnviewasicons 2
#define control_btnsortby 3
#define control_btnsortasc 4
#define control_btntype 6
#define control_btnplaylists 7
#define control_btnscan 9
#define control_btnrec 10
#define control_labelfiles 12
#define control_list 50
#define control_thumbs 51

if you ask me, this is the wrong approach. why have define the controls per window. why not have a single controls.h file that defines all the control actions and then include it in each window.cpp. controls that are not valid for a given window would just be ignored.

[kraqh3d]

now that i know how the actions coorespond to the control ids, i'm going to parse through all the window.cpp files and put together a skinning guide which'll outline all the special actions per window, and what their id's need to be to access them.

but, i cant checkout from anon cvs. i've been getting a message that its locked by jwmulder since last night. can someone with rights check if a lockfile got stuck or something ?

[pike]

cvs should work now again?

[kraqh3d]

oh, was cvs offline on purpose cuz of the dell legal issues?

edit: nevermind... anon cvs is working now.

[Hullebulle]

Originally Posted by (kraqh3d @ june 08 2004,23:05)

oh, was cvs offline on purpose cuz of the dell legal issues?

edit: nevermind... anon cvs is working now.

no. it was down due some sf issues i guess. nothing to do with dell.

[emp3r0r]

kraqh3d: did you ever create that guide?