Review Request: Multiple action support for KRunner

[Ryan Bitanga]

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This is an automatically generated e-mail. To reply, visit:
http://reviewboard.vidsolbach.de/r/178/
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(Updated 2008-11-03 03:39:51.296708)


Review request for Plasma.


Summary
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This introduces multiple action (or noun-verb) support for runners. Each QueryMatch (the noun) can now have multiple actions associated with it.

Actions are QueryActions which inherit QAction. I intend to extend QueryAction to support mimetypes and more functionality. If QueryActions have associated mimetypes, the runner can intelligently select which of the available actions to add to the match.

Another possibility would be to add object support to an action. For example, a match returned by the Desktop Search runner could have the action "Copy to...". The object of the action would be a directory. I'm still looking for ways to implement this. One way would be to have a set of core runners designated as object providers (e.g. Places, Contacts) and run a secondary query on a specific runner.

Because QueryActions are GUI objects, they need to live in the GUI thread. That means that QueryActions must be created outside of the match method, preferably at the time of runner construction. After creation, QueryActions must be registered with QueryActionPool, the global action registry. This allows QueryActions to only be created once during the lifetime of a runner. This also allows runners to add actions that belong to different runners. However, correct execution of the action is left up to the runner in the exec method. I'll provide an example of how to do this soon.

Multiple action support is optional. Runners that do not create actions will continue to function just as they did prior to the introduction of multiple action support.

An example implementation with multiple action support is the amarok-based mediaplayer runner currently in playground. To access the actions, right click on the icon and select the desired action. Note, the temporary solution triggers the action upon selection the action in the context menu. Pressing enter or clicking on the icon will cause the action to be performed again.

QueryAction exists to allow us to determine if a particular action requires a target or not. We can't do this with plain QActions because there is no guarantee that the action will be triggered. Having our own QAction derivative allows us to have the interface have a way to determine if the action requires a target or not and take the appropriate action. For example if the action needs a directory, the interface can query a specified set of runners for matches and provide these to the user. Runners are not aware of the existence of the interface so there is no currently no clear way for a runner to signify that a particular action requires a target. There is no code as of yet that implements this since how this is going to be handled needs to be discussed more thoroughly first. If ever support for actions with objects is not included, QActions would suffice. However, this makes it more difficult to have a compatible path for the introduction of new features in the future.


Diffs
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  /trunk/KDE/kdebase/workspace/libs/plasma/CMakeLists.txt
  /trunk/KDE/kdebase/workspace/libs/plasma/abstractrunner.h
  /trunk/KDE/kdebase/workspace/libs/plasma/abstractrunner.cpp
  /trunk/KDE/kdebase/workspace/libs/plasma/includes/QueryAction
  /trunk/KDE/kdebase/workspace/libs/plasma/queryaction.h
  /trunk/KDE/kdebase/workspace/libs/plasma/queryaction.cpp
  /trunk/KDE/kdebase/workspace/libs/plasma/querymatch.h
  /trunk/KDE/kdebase/workspace/libs/plasma/querymatch.cpp
  /trunk/KDE/kdebase/workspace/libs/plasma/runnermanager.h
  /trunk/KDE/kdebase/workspace/libs/plasma/runnermanager.cpp

Diff: http://reviewboard.vidsolbach.de/r/178/diff


Testing
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Thanks,

Ryan