DataEngine and regular polling.

[Thomas Fjellstrom]

I'm seeing a couple behaviors I didn't really expect.

1. if I let the Applet set an update frequency in connectSource, many 
setData's in the data engine just aren't passed on to the Applet. Thats 
probably intended, but it is somewhat annoying.

2. DataEngine::setPollingInterval seems to poll only once.

My "Network Info" data engine updates bits of its source's data 
asynchronously, things like DNS lookups, and calls to ping (for about 5 
seconds each), and it's kind of annoying that the widget won't see the data 
till the next poll, if it does end up polling.

I suppose I could go back to setting up a timer in the data engine itself to 
update all host's, but that felt dirty. I'd rather use features built into 
plasma itself to manage it all. It'd probably be best to use the update 
interval argument to DataEngine::connectSource in the applet, so the widget 
itself could set the update frequency, but as it stands, it seems plasma 
will merge "dataUpdated" signals, or ignore setData calls till the next 
periodic update, which is kind of too late since the periodic update is just 
going to fire off another async update of one or more of the properties. 
Essentially the data will be behind quite a bit (Depending on the update 
rate selected).


Oh, and in case anyone is still interested, two new screen shots of my 
plasmoid:

http://strangesoft.net/plasma-networkinfo/prototype11.png
http://strangesoft.net/plasma-networkinfo/prototype12.png

My list widget shows up status with an icon, and can collapse groups now :D

-- 
Thomas Fjellstrom
tfjellstrom at shaw.ca