Troubles in Commodity-land

[trixie]

A "commodity" that is just a normal app with a popup key is arguably not a true commodity.

Exactly. This is why I added, many months ago, the following note at the beginning of the Commodities Library wiki page:

In the past, some developers turned their programs into commodities only to provide them with a handy keyboard shortcut to bring up/close their GUI. Please note that such practice is actually a misuse of the commodities framework.

[thomasrapp]

And what is the preferred practice to provide an application with a handy keyboard shortcut?

[trixie]

@thomas

AFAIK there is none at the moment. But registering as a commodity, installing a handler in the CX network and tapping the input stream is hardly a nice way to achieve such functionality. Image all programs doing this!

A possible system solution would be something along the lines of what I implemented in my (unfinished, sadly) application.class. The class runs a CX events subscription server, which applications can contact and "subscribe" to receive a particular event from the commodities network. This way applications can use global hotkeys without installing their own commodities handlers: only ONE handler is required (the CX subscription server, which is in fact a commodity created by the class). This seems to work quite well, testing with the class torso I have here.

[OldFart]

@salass00:

To eat an event you just attach a CxTranslate(NULL) to your filter object.

Information like this is sorely lacking from the wiki.

On a related note: if I want to intercept both lefthand mouse button AND righthand mousebutton events, do I then need to specify 2 CxFilters as well as 2 CxSenders? Or can things be combined into 1 filter pattern like "rawmouse lefthandbutton | righthandbutton" (with disregard to the correct naming)?



@maintainer-of-commodities-wiki:
The generic regular expression, as presented in the wiki contains probably an error:

Code: Select all

[class]  { [-] (qualifier | synonym) ) }  [ [-] upstroke]  [highmap | ANSICode]

Right after 'synonym' there is 1 parentesis too many (or somwhere else 1 should be added...).
I think it should read like this:

Code: Select all

[class]  { [-] (qualifier | synonym)}  [ [-] upstroke]  [highmap | ANSICode]

OldFart

[xenic]

A "commodity" that is just a normal app with a popup key is arguably not a true commodity.

Exactly. This is why I added, many months ago, the following note at the beginning of the Commodities Library wiki page:

In the past, some developers turned their programs into commodities only to provide them with a handy keyboard shortcut to bring up/close their GUI. Please note that such practice is actually a misuse of the commodities framework.

It seems like it's way to late for such a restriction. If you check in your Exchange commodity, you will see many major applications like Odyssey, YAM, MUIBase, Directory Opus etc. Considering the already extensive use of Commodity hotkeys, I'd like a way to find out what hotkeys are already in use and being eaten. I had to do trial-and-error testing to find a working hotkey for my commodity.

[trixie]

It seems like it's way to late for such a restriction.

It's not a restriction - it's a reminder that commodities were designed for something else. And no, it's never too late.

[xenic]

Information like this is sorely lacking from the wiki.

Correcting or improving the WIKI information and examples would be preferable to adding restrictions and warnings.

[trixie]

@xenic

So why don't you go and correct it instead of bitching about?

[xenic]

It seems like it's way to late for such a restriction.

It's not a restriction - it's a reminder that commodities were designed for something else. And no, it's never too late.

Semantics.

[xenic]

@xenic

So why don't you go and correct it instead of bitching about?

Complaining would have been a kinder description of my posts but it seems like you've reached the same level of frustration as I have when trying to write a program based on inaccurate or outdated documentation. I'll take a look at the PopShell.c example and see if I know how to replace the deprecated functions I complained about.