[Panel-devel] Applet to Dataengine issues

[Shawn Starr]

Hi Aaron, 

It seems I've run into a problem. I've attached the current config dialog I 
have created for the weather applet.

Here is the problem:

When the user wants to start adding places to monitor weather they must do the 
following:

1) Select the data source (ion) 
2) Type in the place name
3) click the validate button

What I wanted to do was as soon as the user clicked the validate button, the 
applet would tell the weatherengine to load the selected data source plugin, 
ask the data source if the place the user typed in was valid then return a 
setData(something true), otherwise return a setData(something false). If the 
engine returned false, the applet dialog would then popup an error msgbox 
indicating the datasource does not recognize the place typed.

The problem is, there does not seem to be a way to do this.  I cannot pass 
this to the weatherengine, because there is no way to do any configurations 
from an applet to dataengine.

The other way I could work around this, is to just let the user select the 
datasources, and places, without validation, store those in the KConfig, 
click apply, and then have some way of notifying the dataengine to reload 
itself with the KConfig values set by the applet. The problem with this 
approach is if the user set invalid places (bad names, places that the 
selected datasource cannot get weather for) there is no way to notify the 
applet of these failures.

What do you suggest I do?

Shawn.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: weather.png
Type: image/png
Size: 25289 bytes
Desc: Weather Engine config dialog
Url : http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/panel-devel/attachments/20071008/f91fdee9/attachment-0001.png