How do we use the Music Views and Movie Views in MP Setup

[Taipan]

Could some kind and patient person explain how the Music Views page in Mediaportal Setup is intended to be used? I have played around with it, but I haven’t figured out how to use it, or what value it might be to me …..

Specifically, what is the purpose of this page and what screen (skin page/s) does it affect?

What is the field “Name or Localized Code” for?

What is the meaning or purpose of each of the colums:-
Selection, Operator, restriction, Limit, Asc, ViewAs, Act ?

What values are permitted in the Restriction and Limit columns? They seem to be free-form text fields?

Attached is a screenshot of the MP Setup page that I am referring to. There is a similar page in the Movies section of MP Setup.

As I am not a programmer, I would appreciate it if the explanation is in “layman’s” terms …

[zombiepig]

i can answer a couple of your questions:

Originally Posted by Taipan

Specifically, what is the purpose of this page and what screen (skin page/s) does it affect?

Any music 'database' type pages. ie, artist view, album views, genre views - anything but the 'shares' view. When you're in my music, and go to 'switch view', you'll see a list of all the views you've setup here.

Originally Posted by Taipan

What is the field “Name or Localized Code” for?

Lets you name the view you're setting up. You can either give it your own name like 'Albums sorted by Genre', or if you enter a number associated with a string in strings.xml it will display that. (All the predefined views are given numbers associated with strings, so that they display in the correct language).

Originally Posted by Taipan

What is the meaning or purpose of each of the colums:-
Selection, Operator, restriction, Limit, Asc, ViewAs, Act ?

selection = what field you want to view at this depth. Music views allow you to have multiple different depths. ie, in the screenshot you attached, mp will give you a list of all genres, then if you select a genre, mp will display all tracks with that genre. if you changed the selection field from 'genre' to 'artist', mp would list all artists, and when you pick an artist, it'd display all the tracks associated with that artist.

operator & restriction = these two are linked. if you leave them blank, the view behaves like i've described above. if you pick an operator, it basically lets you restrict the view. EG, (back to the screenshot you attached) if you set operator on the genre line to '=', and restriction to 'reggae', mp would only display tracks with a genre of reggae. or if you had a line with 'artist' '=' 'bob marley', it'd only display bob marley tracks. You can also use other operators like <, and setup a view going 'year' '<' '1970', and call it 'golden oldies' or something

limit = number of results to return. ie, using that golden oldies example, if you put a limit to 100, it'd only display 100 tracks from before 1970.

asc = sort ascending or not. pretty self explanatory.

viewas = type of view to display on this level. means you can make mp display a list of artists, then thumbnails for albums, then a list for tracks from these albums. or thumbnails or artists, a list of years, and a list of tracks. or whatever other combination you could possibly want!!

[zombiepig]

oops, missed off the last column

act = if you click in this column, and press a, it will insert a new row after the one you've currently got selected. if you press b, it'll insert a row before the current one. d will delete the current row. this just makes it a bit easier to setup your views.

[Taipan]

Ah, now I get it ...


zombiepig - your description is excellent!