Just a few easy questions

[perry59]

Just wanted to ask/confirm a couple basic things:

1) When using set/get properties. Looking at the api docs it looks obvious that when setting/getting properties, the api call looks exclusively into the sage.properties file. In other words we cant have it look at a custom properties file? only thing I dont like about that is that if your a tinkerer like me, you may try out numerous stv's, stvi's which will soon bloat your sage.properties file to enormous proportions, even if you uninstall those addons. Seems like it would be better if addons used their own properties files. Yes, I know it would be fairly simple to create my own utility to read/write custom xml files, which I plan to do anyway. It would just be nifty if we could specify a file for the get/set property api call.

2) When using the debug log, is there a way to make the console window resizable? or have the log output to a file? Again I know it would be fairly trivial to make my own function to write my own debug strings to a file, just
looking for the lazy way

3) As was mentioned to me in a previous post, when supplying path names to
widgets, its a lot easier to use relative paths. I did find one api call where this just does not seem to work. That is with the "playsound" call. I tried using this and it would simply not work. Even used a simple static button to initiate it. I then opened up the handy dandy debug window and saw that I was getting java io file not found errors. Seems the call was trying to prepend a full absolute path to my file name and since my sound file was not directly under the sage directory, it didnt work. The only way I could get it to work was by using a full absolute path name in the call. The api docs dont mention this peculiarity.
Is this a bug?

4) I know there was something else I wanted to ask, and now it escapes me.
I'll probably remember right after I make this post

And, just a minor gripe,
When browsing a library, say music or videos, sage seems agonizingly slow to display the thumbnails for artists/albums etc. Digging through the stv code reveals that for every thumbnail, sage is making a call to "getimage" or "getthumbnail", something like that. Mediaportal, on the other hand is blazing fast in this regard. Rather than making an api call on every object it simply queries its database for the location of the thumbnail file it has cached in a folder. WAY faster, plus it makes it easy to tweak your thumbnail display.

Thanks for any comments

[GKusnick]

1. See java.util.Properties.

2. Resize the console window the way you would any Windows command prompt, i.e. by right-clicking the title bar and choosing Properties. Also, if you have debug logging enabled (which you should for Studio work), the debug output is already going to a file (sagetv_0.txt or sagetvclient_0.txt).

3. Maybe you could give specific examples of what paths worked and what paths didn't work.

[perry59]

Originally Posted by GKusnick

1. See java.util.Properties.

Well, my utter noobness with java shows again. I thought this was a specific sage function. Thanks for pointing this out

Originally Posted by GKusnick

2. Resize the console window the way you would any Windows command prompt, i.e. by right-clicking the title bar and choosing Properties. Also, if you have debug logging enabled (which you should for Studio work), the debug output is already going to a file (sagetv_0.txt or sagetvclient_0.txt).

I'm ashamed to admit I had never manipulated a console window this way, I never used them much even though I've been using windows since 3.1
Sheesh, the dork factor at work again

Originally Posted by GKusnick

3. Maybe you could give specific examples of what paths worked and what paths didn't work.

for example this works fine:
PlaySound("C:\\Program Files\\SageTV\\SageTV\\STVs\\mytheme\\Sounds\\notify.wav")
but this (and a few variations) does not:
PlaySound("Sounds\\notify.wav")
I did not try every concievable variation on this...

Thanks again Greg

[Opus4]

The default STV uses those java properties routines for the theme system and for the online video setup, so there are som eexamples of that type of use.

The sounds can use a relative path from the SageTV working directory (where the exe is located). I don't remember whether it can be relative to the STV path.

- Andy

[perry59]

Originally Posted by Opus4

The default STV uses those java properties routines for the theme system and for the online video setup, so there are som eexamples of that type of use.

The sounds can use a relative path from the SageTV working directory (where the exe is located). I don't remember whether it can be relative to the STV path.

- Andy

Ah, I'll try using a path relative to the working dir then.

Thanks!