(2014-06-27, 21:53)kricker Wrote: (2014-05-05, 16:14)Jeroen Wrote: It's most likely not an issue, the widgets don't change upon changing the main menu selection. The widgets are in what I refer to as shelf and are placed next to each other in a horizontal list.
Is this possible to do, or does the skinning engine limit this ability? In confluence these "widgets" are how my son quickly determines what new show or movie he wants to watch. He will not instinctively know to navigate through the "shelf" as you call it. I also like the idea mentioned earlier in the thread about an auto rotate feature. I think that combined with the shelf content intelligently changing with the main menu item selection would work quite well. I'd be happy to dig in and try it myself if I ever get the time, as long as I know ahead of time it is possible to do. As a designer by trade, I understand and respect your desire to control and keep things as you envision them. Therefore I am happy to do the work myself for something that is a preference for myself.
I had a play at doing this myself a while back, so it's definitely possible.
First you'd need to add a way to select a widget for main menu items - it'd need button 309 in script-skinshortcuts.xml (probably with a visibility condition to only show for main menu items), and a way to tell the skin shortcuts script which widgets are available - see section "Overrides.xml", part 4 in the scripts
Advanced Usage docs (and there's a section near the top on displaying things in the skin based on this which might be of interest, too).
The other half of the job is then displaying the widget, based on the widget property of the main menu item. The code for the shelf, where you'd want to manage this, is in HomeMenu.xml, starting somewhere around line 135. The style of menu on reFocus - whereby main and sub-menu items are interweaved - causes one issue, which is that if you're focused on a submenu item, the main menu item (and therefore its widget property) isn't available. I got around this by using on focus to set the widget to a window property if the item were a main menu item (main menu items don't have the property "isSubmenu"), but there's probably a better way to do this.
It's actually not too difficult a job to do. But to do it well is, of course, another matter