Custom Context Browser Sections Patch

[Bradley Pesicka]

Christie Harris wrote:

>On Tuesday 20 June 2006 13:17, Bradley Pesicka wrote:
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>>Known issues:
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>>- Some sections, expecially the last.fm wiki, can take up large amounts
>>of a row.  If there is a good way to set the maximum size that an
>>element can be, please let me know. I tried to use max-width in one
>>place, but that does not seem to be working.
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>Can the number of artists fetched be limited, perhaps? Maybe to top 10 or 20. 
>Generally, these would be the *most* similar anyway, and I'm sure it'd be a 
>faster retrieval. THis would also help keep the height shorter when on the 
>same row as other scripts.
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The problem here is not the number of artists, but the size of the wiki 
results and the fact that I cannot seem to set a maximum width for the 
sections.  The wiki tab squishes everything else horizontally.

>One improvement I'd like to see, is the ability to perhaps be able to specify 
>the placement of the script box (maybe in a script configuration dialogue?) 
>as in, which row it should appear on. Mainly because some scripts, for 
>example the wiki one, bring in a lot more data to be displayed, as you said, 
>and should probably be displayed on their own row.
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Current, the sections are sorted by the section name.  This is why the 
track information show up first (it is named "0 external_track_info" ).

>Alternatively, perhaps this could replace wikipedia eventually as the wiki 
>lookup on the artist tab :D
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>>- Seperating the sections on the same row is done rather haphazardly at
>>the moment.  It works, but it does not look very good.
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>At the moment, long album names don't wrap in Standard Artist Album - this 
>tends to throw the formatting out a bit. 
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I know. this is done with nobr tags.  On my system, this keeps those 
sections from being squashed.  This is a hack because I cannot seem to 
limit the width of the sections.

>I also don't seem to get anything showing up for Suggested Songs - the box 
>disappears once last.fm data is fetched.
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The sections disappear if there are no results. The suggested songs look 
in your collection for songs by suggested artists.  I looked and could 
not find anything at last.fm for suggested songs, just suggested artists.

>>- Some of the scripts use a caching mechanism to speed up content
>>generation. That cache never expires.
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>Could this be what's stopping the redrawing if I stop a script? At the moment, 
>I have Albums and Favourite Songs by the previous artist, while the currently 
>playing info and last.fm stuff updates properly. Stopping a script doesn't 
>seem to remove it from the context browser - it just stops updating. Then on 
>restart, if I have 'resume playback on start' checked, Only the Current Track 
>stuff shows up, until song change. After that, only the scripts I want to run 
>are running.
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How does the Albums and Favorite Songs sections stop working? Does it 
just stop? Or did you stop the script?

If you stopped the script, this is also a different issue.  I cannot 
seem to get the script to handle SIGTERM to remove the section from the 
context browser.  The way it currently is, a section keeps its contents 
untill it is told to change/remove it.

If not, please let me know what you did before it stopped working.

>>- I don't know if the scoring/rating works or not. I have the dynamic
>>collection patch that may affect it and don't feel like removing it.
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>It's partly working I think - I get ratings showing up in the current track 
>info - but not in Fave Songs.
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As to the favorites, it is likely a problem with my SQL statement.  It 
uses the same code to generate the HTML as the current track info.

>>Eventually I would like to see all the content in the context browser
>>(home, podcast, streams, etc.) generated in scripts.  I find that
>>scripts are very flexible and are a large part of what makes Amarok
>>wonderful.
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>>I would appreciate any questions, comments, suggestions, bug fixes, etc.
>>that you have.
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>This is an awesome proof of concept! The last.fm tag cloud rocks :)
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>Cheers!
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>Christie
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Thanks.

Something was just mentioned on #amarok about WideFnis being able to do 
columns completely in a theme.  I will be looking into this more.