secure exam mode for schools

[Thomas Michael Weissel]

hello everybody,

due to a lack of knowledge in this field i ran into a problem and i am 
hoping to find someone here who is able to provide the needed 
information/help

so thank you in advance.

i am currently working on an application for "secure exam environments" 
for schools in austria and it looks like this project is about to gain 
some traction.  (and therefore my efforts to make it good)


problem description:

i need to load a completely different plasmashell layout 
(widgets/background/shortcuts/etc) and a lot of KIOSK settings from 
/etc/kde5rc in order to switch a running kde desktop into "exam mode" - 
this is working great already for a whole classroom on the click of a 
button on the teachers laptop but...

currently i am replacing the config files (like kwinrc, 
plasma-org.kde.plasma.desktop-appletsrc, kglobalshortcutsrc) with those 
special exam versions and then brutally kill Xorg... recently i started 
to use kquitapp5 and kstart5 for plasmashell and "kwin --replace" for 
kwin instead because i found a way to temporarily disable tty's without 
an xorg.conf thanx to systemd - but this still is a terrible way to do 
this in my opinion for QDbus enabled applications...  there has to be a 
better way..


what am i searching for:

# a way to reload the configuration of plasmashell and kwin without 
restarting them (also reread /etc/kde5rc)

# a way to export a full configured plasmashell layout into a file and 
load it from the commandline (this must be possible with 5.9 somehow -> 
lookandfeelexplorer <- )

qdbus org.kde.plasmashell /PlasmaShell dumpCurrentLayoutJS   ????


---------
i spent the last 2 hours trying to wrap my head around qdbus 
(qdbusviewer got me at least closer ) and i can "sense" now that this 
thing is really powerful but i am far from understandig and reliable 
using it ..

so if someone could help with this specific problems or just help me 
understandig how to use those values this would be very much appreciated.

have a nice day!
thomas weissel