[eumel]

Is there a wiki page to the structure to take one closer to the optimum?
Visibility and conditinal includes but is the only way, a kind of if then else and have to replace content dynamically.
Variables under conditions may be amended, would be good.

Is it something perhaps in the near future?

[andyblac]

you understand wrong

my point was that having includes nested 4 times deep into each other is bound to bring up errors and include things that you really didn't want included in the new stuff so unless you can follow it all down to its complete begining base it will probably end up causing lots of errors. like visiblilty and animations happening that you didn't want because you thought your were just including a simple image dimension that turns out to be lots more.

Includes are fine if you manage them right

then this not the problem with my mod. the more things i remove, so it reduce my code length, the errors start to go away. i have NO missing include errors at all. i am convinced i have hit the limit.

if i add a simple thing like adding another media flag the errors get worse. so i am sure it is the more lines of code the worse things are getting. and the errors are RANDOM. it just seem to me like XBMC app just getting lost.

my skin is over 50,000 lines of code. the first thing to go adrift in my mod is the letter scrolling. which the visible is hard code by XBMC using "Container.Scrolling" so i would disagree.

[Hitcher]

CF2009 to me it looks liek someone has just stuffed up the coding of the skin and made it not valid xml so when xbmc tries to read the control it thinks that it says type="1"

And the other one looks like exactly the same they screwed up the formating of an animation tag and it can't read it right and is spitting out the error.

Now as for fixing it I suggest you turn on debug logging so you can actually tell what window you are in when it happens ot what you are doing then look through the xml files accociated with it (includes and all) and find the ones that someone did a typo in

And just to prove its a skin bug

Is in <include>Viewtype_List_Low</include> somewhere if you remove that line from MyVideoNav.xml then that error goes away from the log

I'd almost bet my left testical its

The AEON code is a complete nightmare of include including another include and then another looping all round the place. Hitcher AEON is a good example of where things start to go wrong by adding in everybody's hackup up version of a mod and trying to intergrate them into a 1 skin.
If things start dissappearing its probably due to the 500 different visible conditions and layouts for the one view, Multiplex is a good example not having being done proper and to the xbmc skinning standard. Low List is even better example with the 5 or so options up the top and then it has its own 5 or so options on the bottom. all jammed in one big copper pot melted and then released as one skin.

I would garentee you if some one took the time to redo them all logically from start to finish and to work with each other from day 1 you wouldn't have any of these troubles. It would also fix the Slowness that AEON based skins have.

And including hacks like direct access to image on the HDD and using Studio tag hacks to display other stuff doesn't help the skin work very well either.

I don't know what its like recently but My version of Hitcher AEON (about 3 weeks old) has tonnes of errors in the log about Invalid Includes due either to the poor coding of the skin or the way they were all mashed together.

And any of these other errors are nothing different its simple errors and typos in the xml code or bad visible conditions or animations or hacky ways of doing stuff that is not supported

Thanks for all the input Jezz_X. It certainly helps a novice like me to hear from the expert about these things.
I just wish there was a bit more info in the debug log regarding what's happening with the skin side of things.

[eumel]

I know it's off topic, but since it is here just a little issue was, I still have a question about this.
Can it be that far-fetched, but the questions come to me to mind.

Is there something like global and locale includes?
A skin is divided into windows, it would be the loading and speed improvement, if you really only loads what is needed?
As an example, the Aeon skin there is the Multiplex-View in a file contains the music and video view. The view is thus in the MyVideoNav.xml and in the MyMusic.xml loaded.
Would it make sense to pack the music multiplexview in a separate file / Include, separately from the video multiplex, which is really just music elements are loaded?