What exactly causes text (filename) rendered as picture

[P3rv3rt B3ar]

I really hope some of u more experienced guys, gives me answer to this as soon as possible, since this is at vital importance on advancement of my upcoming plugin...

So question is what exactly causes xlobby variable which is translated as filename to rendered as picture instead of text?

lets say for example i have:

category>movies>starimage (this one is renderer as pic)

now i can also device other variables which should be basicly translated to same field in category item, that above variable is pointing at... but yet they are rendered as text which gives filename of above mentioned pic, instead of actually drawing pic...

So i need to know what exactly triggers picture drawing process...

[P3rv3rt B3ar]

Or is the cause of different behavior just because Xhelper.convertVariable() seems to operate only with Strings while getVariable() works with objects... so does this mean that if i call convertVariable() inside my implementation of getVariable() im stuck with text on my "image recycling" code?

[P3rv3rt B3ar]

Ok i used other aproach and load pics now in my plugin, but to be able to do that correctly i need to translate skin:// variable. How can i achieve that in my plugin?

ive tried ConvertVariable() with

- skin
- skin:
- skin:/
- skin://

and nothing seems to work... is there a way?

[art]

I may be wrong, but I don't think you can get value of skin://. What you could do as a workaround is grab base dir of XL (System.AppDomain.CurrentDomain.BaseDirectory) and read "xlobby.xml" for the <skin> tag which will give you active skin dir...

[P3rv3rt B3ar]

Yes i guess i have to do it that way... thanx for the idea.