Navigation Help

[mememe]

I've been changing the look of my skin lately. I finally found something I like and seems to work. However, I failed to realize one thing with the music category. To most it will be obvious:



The only way to get to the track listing is to change the album unless it's right on the edge. I could change the layout, but I like the way it turned out. Is there some way to make it jump from the album selection on the left to the track list in the middle when the album is clicked on?

Edit: Actually, what would be ideal is if I could click on an album and then have the sublevel be the track selection list. However, I haven't been able to get it to do this without limiting me to the same 1:1 item ratio as set in the category already. If I could keep the cd covers how they are, but the sub-items be displayed longwise horizontally, that is what I'd most prefer.

[Marbles_00]

How are you controlling everything? By remote? If so, are you using xRemote? Just wondering as I have some ideas brewing in my head, but would require xRemote/Girder and a remote control to pull it off. If your not using those, then I'm not sure if it will work. If I get a chance, I'm going to try this at home and see what happens. I'll let you know.

[mememe]

Right now I'm just using my trusty old MCE remote (because it "just worked" with xlobby), but I would have no problems configuring it to work with girder/xremote. There are a lot of buttons on it that aren't being used and could be mapped to do whatever is needed. If nothing else, this would finally be an excuse to pick up a harmony remote. Let me know what you have in mind and maybe between the two of us we can figure something out.


Edit:

I think I found a way to do what I want. I've already got it working for my television shows. It also answers my post in another thread in this section so that's a happy bonus. Now let's see how well I can explain it (Marbles, I know you know most of these steps, but I'm going to make it simple for people to follow who might stumble on it later).

First step is to create the event needed:

1. press F2 to enter the setup menu
2. goto "Events"
3. create a new group by clicking "Add Group" and name it whatever you wish
4. create a new event in this group by clicking "Add Event"
5. now in the "Commands" tab select "set category level"
6. add a category name for each category you want in the set seperated by a comma (in this case I did "tv1,tv2,tv3" without the quotes)
7. click "add" (I don't think it's testable anyway)
8. close the setup window

The next step is to actually create the categories we just set in the event (tv1,tv2, and tv3):

1. navigate to the screen you want the categories to be displayed in
2. press "pause/break" to open the skin editor
3. click the "Screen" tab
4. in the "Category" box, type the name of your new category (the names must match what you created in the event or it won't work) and click "Add"
5. repeat step 4 as many times as needed (in this case 3 times since I have 3 levels)

Lastly we need to set the categories we just created to work properly:

1. click the "item" tab in the skin editor window
2. click on the "default" tab and find your first category (tv1) in the list and select it
3. click on the "Category" tab (if it's grayed out, go back and repeat step 2 because you don't have control of the category)
4. the "Name" field should match the name of the category (tv1), if it doesn't this won't work
5. click on the "Events" sub-tab within the category tab (NOT the "Event" tab that's always present in the skin editor)
6. click "assign"
7. select the event you just created and click "select" (this event only needs to be set on the first category)
8. click on the "Database" tab and select the appropriate database
9. repeat step 8 for for each category in the set (in this case for all 3 categories)
10. configure your categories to display any way you like, each one can be completely different from the others

That's it. This is how mine turned out:



Why 3 levels when the first two use the same layout? Because with a couple of tweaks on the category tab it could just as easily look like this:




BUT....

This doesn't seem to work for databases with music in them. Every time I've tried, the category simply adds the album to the playlist rather than acting like the video categories and allowing me to go to lower levels. I'm hoping it's something really simple I'm missing. Is this possibly a default behavior for xlobby? Any ideas Marbles?

[Marbles_00]

Gotta admit, that's cooler than what I was thinking of. I was thinking along the lines of when you skim over your albums and your tracks show. When you select your album, it opens an overlay showing only the tracks, layered on top of the music screen's track database. This way, you'd get the appearance of the albums still, but have access to the tracks for any particular album selected. You can pick your tracks, or play all, or do all the track control from the overlay.

Then when you want to go back to your album select, you'd have an event tied the the remote button that controls going left, that will close the overlay and take you back to the underlying screen.

I was trying to set this up last night, but fell asleep...damn hate that when it happens as I get all kinked up. Your way though is much better.

I think the whole process is even easier than what I initially thought....don't know why I didn't remember this...maybe because short of trying it out, I haven't used it, but I think what you want to do is covered in Buddabing's post here:
viewtopic.php?f=12&t=4778&start=15

Sample files can be had from Sharp_1's links at the end of that forum post. Basically you want to display a folder in a category.

[mememe]

I gave the badabing method a try, but it didn't work as I needed due to how the events were already configured. However, it does seem to have broken the "add playlist" behavior I was having trouble with. I'm guessing it has something to do with something in my current skin that I'm brain farting on since that's the behavior I used to prefer for that category. Having it broken though allowed me to use the method I posted above to achieve what I wanted. Here's how it ended up:

How it was before:


How it is now:


It works exactly how I want now. As a nice bonus I was able to fill the space that previously had the track selection window with the playlist window and commands which allowed me to remove the seperate overlay I was using before.

As usual, thanks for the help Marbles.