Developing STVs/STVIs using SageTV6

[nielm]

Just a small warning to any STV/STVI devs: STV(i)s written by SageTV v6.0 Studio are not backward compatible with 5.0, to the point that Sage will not even load/import the STV(i)

So far, I have worked around this by removing the following lines in the xml files saved by Studio v6

<BackgroundComponent>false</BackgroundComponent>

(a new Panel attribute) and

<AutoRepeatAction>false</AutoRepeatAction>

(a new Image attribute).
Removing those lines seems to allow 5.0 to load a 6.0 STV(i)...

Obviously there are new API functions that if used will cause run-time errors, but these are fairly easy to avoid, and the run-time errors are more obvious than failure to load with no error message!

Hope this helps anyone

[dflachbart]

Originally Posted by nielm

Just a small warning to any STV/STVI devs: STV(i)s written by SageTV v6.0 Studio are not backward compatible with 5.0, to the point that Sage will not even load/import the STV(i)

So far, I have worked around this by removing the following lines in the xml files saved by Studio v6

<BackgroundComponent>false</BackgroundComponent>

(a new Panel attribute) and

<AutoRepeatAction>false</AutoRepeatAction>

(a new Image attribute).
Removing those lines seems to allow 5.0 to load a 6.0 STV(i)...

Obviously there are new API functions that if used will cause run-time errors, but these are fairly easy to avoid, and the run-time errors are more obvious than failure to load with no error message!

Hope this helps anyone

Niel, thanks a lot for the info. Andy already pointed out that the STVs are not backward compatible, so I had to leave a 5.0 server test installation on my dev machine (which was a PITA because the new 6.0 beta client will *uninstall* any 5.0 version without asking, so I had to do some renaming tricks to get this to work) in order to provide bugfixes for 5.0 code in the future.

With this info I will be able to ditch the 5.0 server and do all dev on the 6.0 client.

Dirk

[nielm]

What I forgot to mention is that:

There may be other new attributes that I have not yet tripped over

...And I found that these were causing the problem by looking at the logfile when opening a v6 STV(i) in SageTV 5.0. Amongst a whole load of java exception stack traces, you will find a line identifying the offending xml tag:

Caused by: org.xml.sax.SAXException: unrecognized tag AutoRepeatAction

[GKusnick]

Originally Posted by nielm

There may be other new attributes that I have not yet tripped over

Mechanically scanning both the V5 and V6 STVs and comparing the results, the only new attributes I find are the two you mentioned: AutoRepeatAction and BackgroundComponent. (Although, curiously, RenderXFormScaleX and RenderXFormScaleY seem to have disappeared from the V6 STV.)

This ties in with my earlier request for a definitive list of widget property names:

http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=20332

Sure would be nice to get these documented somewhere.

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by GKusnick

(Although, curiously, RenderXFormScaleX and RenderXFormScaleY seem to have disappeared from the V6 STV.)

Only the widget properties that get used are listed in the STV's XML file & those just happen to no longer be used where they were in the past -- when cycling through the NTE letters for a number.

And, any of the new widget properties listed in the v6 Studio manual that aren't actually used yet also won't appear in the XML file, such as the one for the Image widget's new "Scaling Insets" (ScalingInsets).

This ties in with my earlier request for a definitive list of widget property names:

http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=20332

Sure would be nice to get these documented somewhere.

Oh yeah... I never replied there because there isn't a list for that so far, and I don't yet know about it for the future.

- Andy

[GKusnick]

Thanks for the clarification. I've updated my list in the other thread.