Removing garbage widgets from STV

[dflachbart]

I know I can safely remove

- "circularities" widgets
- yellow action chain widgets

from an STV.


What about orphaned blue action chains (for e.g. a blue IF action chain at the root level which leads to an UI widget ? I assume I can remove them as well (as long as they dont contain any widgets referenced elsewhere), since they never get executed ? Is this correct ?


Thanks,

Dirk

[Opus4]

If they are in the root like that & have no references to them, they shouldn't ever be used as far as I know & would be safe to delete. They probably showed up there after having a parent removed.

- Andy

[dflachbart]

Originally Posted by Opus4

If they are in the root like that & have no references to them, they shouldn't ever be used as far as I know & would be safe to delete. They probably showed up there after having a parent removed.

- Andy

That's what I thought, thanks for the confirmation.


Dirk

[dflachbart]

As a follow-up question, what about other widget types (e.g. panels, items, etc) in the root hierarchy ? Does anything else besides menus and hooks make sense as a root widget ? If not, can I assume that (as long as those orphaned widget trees are not referenced from somewhere else) these can be safely deleted as well ?

Thanks,
Dirk

[GKusnick]

Root-level Hook widgets are potentially active (although it may depend on the specific hook type).

Apart from that, anything other than Menus that shows up at root level is by definition unreferenced and can be deleted.

Even unreferenced (non-bold) Menus can be deleted, except for the three special menu names Main Menu, Screen Saver, and Server Connection Lost, which are referenced by name from the Sage core. (Might be nice if Studio would always show those three menu names in bold.)

Just be careful when you delete a widget tree that there are no bold primary references within the tree. One trick I use is to select the bold widget and do Ctrl+U, Ctrl+D on it to send the primary reference somewhere else.

Personally I think the Delete command would be a lot more intuitive (and a lot safer) if deleting a widget automatically deleted the whole subtree, excluding any primary references. That would minimize the danger of deleting something you want to keep, without littering the root level with a lot of orphan widgets.

[dflachbart]

Originally Posted by GKusnick

Apart from that, anything other than Menus that shows up at root level is by definition unreferenced and can be deleted.

I could see one potentially exception to this rule: if some STV code would modify the tree structure at runtime so that an unreferenced node suddenly becomes referenced. But I doubt there is code out there which does that ...

Originally Posted by GKusnick

Just be careful when you delete a widget tree that there are no bold primary references within the tree. One trick I use is to select the bold widget and do Ctrl+U, Ctrl+D on it to send the primary reference somewhere else.

Yep, that's what I thought I would do ...

Originally Posted by GKusnick

Personally I think the Delete command would be a lot more intuitive (and a lot safer) if deleting a widget automatically deleted the whole subtree, excluding any primary references. That would minimize the danger of deleting something you want to keep, without littering the root level with a lot of orphan widgets.

100% agree on this one ...


Btw, so what's up with this orphaned "IsPVR350OSDEnabled() && HasPVR350TVOutput()" that I first noticed in the standard 4.1 STV, and which is still in 5.0 ? Anyone knows ?

Thanks for the clarifications,

Dirk

[gplasky]

Originally Posted by GKusnick

Personally I think the Delete command would be a lot more intuitive (and a lot safer) if deleting a widget automatically deleted the whole subtree, excluding any primary references. That would minimize the danger of deleting something you want to keep, without littering the root level with a lot of orphan widgets.

Expand the widget, highlight everything and delete.

Gerry

[GKusnick]

Originally Posted by gplasky

Expand the widget, highlight everything and delete.

That's exactly what you don't want to do. If there are primary references embedded in there, you'll end up deleting code that you want to keep. (I.e. it will delete all the singly-referenced widgets under the primary ref, even though they're still needed by code elsewhere hanging on to secondary refs.)

When deleting large chunks of code, there's really no alternative to going through it manually, booting the primary refs somewhere else, before it's safe to block-select and delete what's left over. This is the part that would be easier and safer if automated.

[dflachbart]

Originally Posted by gplasky

Expand the widget, highlight everything and delete.

Gerry

Yeah true, but quite error-prone, I don't know how often I accidently deleted a widget I didn't want to because I selected more lines than needed ...

Dirk

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by flachbar

Btw, so what's up with this orphaned "IsPVR350OSDEnabled() && HasPVR350TVOutput()" that I first noticed in the standard 4.1 STV, and which is still in 5.0 ? Anyone knows ?

Someone may place test code there instead of deleting it just to keep it for future reference. I've done that a few times under If False lines -- something that isn't needed now may be useful & turned on later.

Generally, you can delete whatever you don't want to have in your STV. I would just be careful about deciding to add such deletions to an import, though.

- Andy

[nielm]

Originally Posted by GKusnick

Even unreferenced (non-bold) Menus can be deleted, except for the three special menu names Main Menu, Screen Saver, and Server Connection Lost

.. unless you are using my dynamic menu import which links to menus by Name, and does not reference them...

I have asked for a delete widget tree function in the past, which would automaticaly delete orphans, and only dereference widgets linked elsewhere, but it never came... It is also difficult to implement, as handling loops is pretty difficult...

[dflachbart]

Originally Posted by nielm

I have asked for a delete widget tree function in the past, which would automaticaly delete orphans, and only dereference widgets linked elsewhere, but it never came... It is also difficult to implement, as handling loops is pretty difficult...

Yeah, I wished we had such a delete function built into the SageAPI. I ended up writing my own widget tree deletion in java which can handle loops. If interested, it's available in my import library...

Dirk