(2012-08-02, 13:25)Montellese Wrote: In my initial PR which added SendText and ExecuteAction I first had an implementation of SendKey instead of SendText but jmarshall and others said that we don't want a generic SendKey because it would be very likely to be abused by remote clients to e.g. send "O" for the player OSD but it might not work for all users because of custom keymaps. If you want a user configurable remote then provide them with buttons that trigger actions instead of a keyboard. Actions are much easier to understand and remember than keys and are safer to use because they work the same for every XBMC installation independent of any keymap or something else.
I'm sorry but I must disagree on this one.
Users sets keymaps and use them afterwards so each user know perfectly what key does what action they do on his installation.
I do agree that remote makers for show OSD or known commands must use the send action. But for advanced user (those same that to use personal keymaps) showing a keyboard for direct access to what they choose to do is much more logical.
A user that is tell to copy a custom keymap for a specific addon will do that but don't really understand what he do.
Giving the user a very complex interface so that he type the command like : Addon.OpenSettings(script.xbmc.boblight) (don't even know if it does work in current implementation).
And I don't talk about the complexity of developing such interface to present a beautiful interface for end user.
And of course you loose the use of physical phone keyboard (This one is also true for the SendText that can't do direct keyboard to dialog with backspace support).
This is more work for user to start a dialog to put a text send it. Then realize there's an error, and retype it completely. (Yes I can let the old text for next try but then if it's a new dialog the user have a manual action to clear text).
All this leaves EventServer the only way to go loosing this ability would be a real loose of functionality for remote makers and end users. (And since there's still the unicode problem with EventServer it would be really cool to either correct EventServer or add the same functionality in JSON).