XWidgetSoft Forum

Other widget engines have built-in functions to open files for reading data. They support different file types. Using Xwidget I want to read a json data file and so I simply want Xwidget to open this target file and be able to format and display the various fields.

It seems that Xwidget has few methods to open and read a data file. The Xwidget engine has a core to read RSS style data but no others seem to exist, which is a severe limitation.

So, if you know of a widget that opens/reads data files using anything other than the rsscore then please let me know, if there is any documentation please point me in the right direction. For the moment as a workaround I suppose I will have to resort to pure javascript but I'd really rather not.

Having looked into the problem, Xwidget's limitations lead me to think that I will have to create my next widget using the Yahoo Widget engine that has all this functionality built by default into the filesystem object. I can easily open/read data from files using this engine -

filesystem.volumes
filesystem.copy()
filesystem.createDirectory()
filesystem.emptyRecycleBin()
filesystem.emptyTrash()
filesystem.getDirectoryContents()
filesystem.getDisplayName()
filesystem.getFileInfo()
filesystem.getMD5()
filesystem.getRecycleBinInfo()
filesystem.getTrashInfo()
filesystem.isDirectory()
filesystem.isPathAllowed()
filesystem.itemExists()
filesystem.move()
filesystem.moveToRecycleBin()
filesystem.moveToTrash()
filesystem.open()
filesystem.openRecycleBin()
filesystem.openTrash()
filesystem.readFile()
filesystem.reveal()
filesystem.remove()
filesystem.unzip()
filesystem.writeFile()
filesystem.zip()

I would have preferred to use the Xwidget engine as this is what I am teaching myself at the moment and the widget I want to build is compatible graphically with my Panzer widgets.





I suppose what is wanted is a filesystem core to enable a file to be read and the data parsed. If the API to write core was revealed then perhaps it could be provided by the community.

Post changed from a request for help to a feature request.

I [ab]use the RSS core for this, using a Regex to try and pull the data I need from the target file on disk or remotely.

I guessed this might be the way. I think I will use the Yahoo widget engine to create the more complex widgets as the Xwidget engine is still a little immature to to the advanced stuff. Do you have some code as an example?


Note: that the Yahoo widget engine has a whole range of filesystem tools that will open almost all file types. I have added these to the OP.

I will change this post into a feature request.

Thankyou! I'll need to do a lot of coding to handle the .json data file. I have the konfabulator widget working already as you can see on this screenshot.

The latest version of my win rate widget, this is the konfabulator version that works, I have built an identical Xwidget version but so far it seems to be too much work to get it to parse a json file. It might be possible so I won't abandon the Xwidget version just yet.