Device selection order

Is there a way to control the order a plugin's devices appear in the device selection popup menu? If the only way is via the ASCII sort sequence, what are the rules on device naming?

[matt (support)]

They are sorted by name only. Devices should be able to have arbitrary string names as long as they have legal character encodings.

You might want to use folders though instead for organization. Plugins can create folders and move devices they create/own into those folders:

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newFolder = indigo.devices.folder.create("myPluginFolderName")
indigo.device.moveToFolder(dev1, value=newFolder)
indigo.device.moveToFolder(dev2, value=newFolder)
indigo.device.moveToFolder(dev3, value=newFolder)
indigo.device.moveToFolder(dev4, value=newFolder)

Matt: Sorry if I wasn't clear. I was referring to the popup list of Device types that is presented in the Device ConfigUI. The list drawn from the id parameter in the Device tags in Devices.xml.

I would like to control the order the types are presented.

[matt (support)]

Are you referring to the device type shown in the main Device dialog (before the plugin config UI dialog is shown)?

I don't recall how that works -- is it currently sorting alpha numerically versus the order of definition in the XML file?

Yes. To be more accurate, it is the model. As in...

ss.png (58.63 KiB) Viewed 3499 times

It appears to be an alpha sort on the Device's id parameter. It also appears that the character set is restricted. Starting the id with characters like • to force a sort order throws errors.

[jay (support)]

It's alphabetical by type name (not id). I inserted a bullet and it worked fine - what was the error it threw?

Sorry, I was unclear. The error is thrown when the device is queried.

So, this...

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<Device id="ifKit" type="custom" >
      <Name>•Phidgets Interface Kit</Name>

results in this...

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>>> print indigo.devices[1267280394]
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<console>", line 1, in <module>
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u2022' in position 1788: ordinal not in range(128)

[jay (support)]

That's because the python "print" statement tries to use str() on the value - which won't work because the bullet is a unicode character.

So, I can use characters like •, ≥, etc. to "force" a sort order, but, I wouldn't be able to print them out easily (like for testing, etc.).

Sounds like it isn't worth it, and would certainly confuse others don the road.

Thanks.

[jay (support)]

Yep - using odd characters to force sort order is rarely a good idea.

Agreed. So, could you throw this into the circular file of someday features... a Device model tag <Sort> if it existed, the contents would be used to create the sort, following the same rules used for <Name>. If it did not exist, then Sort would = Name.

So, I could code:

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<Device id="ifKit" type="custom" >
      <Name>Phidgets Interface Kit</Name>
                <Sort>1</Sort>
                ...

[jay (support)]

Ok - after some investigation (because this sounded familiar), I've found that unlike the events and actions, we are sorting the device types based on the device type name (as identified above). Not sure why we did that exactly (probably had some reason), but we can't remember why.

It seems like the better idea is to allow the device types to be sorted by the order they are declared in the XML just like we do events and actions. So we'll make that change in the next release unless someone has a problem with it.

Great. No objection here,

Thanks.

It seems like the better idea is to allow the device types to be sorted by the order they are declared in the XML just like we do events and actions. So we'll make that change in the next release unless someone has a problem with it.

I object!!

/me trolling


(I don't actually object).

[matt (support)]

The next beta of Indigo 6 is available which maintains the order defined in the XML.