[Kde-hardware-devel] Data format for RemoteControl events

[Michael Zanetti]

No ideas, anyone?

Michael

On Wednesday 09 September 2009 22:40:13 Michael Zanetti wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> As some of you may know I'm currently working on a remote control
>  integration for solid with a lirc backend. Now I have a problem regarding
>  the api.
> 
> Until now, lirc remote control keypresses are represented as a free-form
> string containing the button name. The button names are defined in
>  lircd.conf and for this they vary from remote to remote and from system to
>  system.
> 
> As you can immagine this makes it really hard for application developers to
> work with remotes because you need a place where you can map those free
>  form strings to functions.
> 
> It would be very nice to have a set of defined buttons an app developer can
> work with. For example a slideshow tool could just connect to the
> buttonPressed(event) signal and process it like:
> 
> switch(event->id()){
> 	case Left:
> 		showPrevious();
> 		break;
> 	case Right:
> 		showNext();
> 		break;
> }
> 
> Well, the lirc and ubuntu guys have also recognized this problem and have
> created something called "namespace". This is a defined set of button names
> that tries to stay as near as possible to linux/input.h. [1] Currently
>  about 60% of lirc remotes are converted and work is going on.
> 
> In my opinion it would be a good idea to adapt this. On the other hand, I
> would like to stay compatible to backends not having defined button names.
> 
> This means I'd need something like the following:
> 
> class RemoteControlEvent
> {
> public:
>   enum ButtonID {Play, Pause ... Stop, Invalid};
> 
>   RemoteControlEvent(const QString &buttonName);
>   RemoteControlEvent(ButtonID);
> 
>   ButtonID id();
>   QString name();
>   QString translatedName();
> };
> 
> If the event is created using the QString c'tor it would set the ID to
> ButtonID::Invalid and indicating the app developer that this isn't a button
> defined in the namespace. He can use the free-form string or just ignore
>  it.
> 
> If the event is created using the ButtonID c'tor, the id would be set
> accordingly and the name would be set to a nice human readable name of the
> button. Also, the perhas a translated name would be of interest if the
> developer would like to show it in a ui.
> 
> However, the lirc namespace contains already about 400 button ids... This
>  is quite a lot and im in daubt if my approach is really the best in this
>  situation. It would require a 400-entries containing enum and some 400
>  entries containing switch statement for the names and translations...
>  Also, this wouldn't be very nice to maintain...
> 
> Is there a better way or perhaps already a KDE way of dealing with such
> problems?
> 
> What do you think about the situation? Thanks for all your input.
> 
> Cheers,
> Michael
> 
> [1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/RemoteControls (Section Lirc Signal Naming)
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