[sugar] how does an activity connect to the journal?

[Paul Fox]

tomeu wrote:
 > On Thu, Feb 28, 2008 at 3:10 PM, Paul Fox <pgf at foxharp.boston.ma.us> wrote:
 > >  ah -- okay -- the "Datastore" section says my app must store its
 > >  complete state in the datastore, to let it show up in the journal.
 > >  but i'm not sure what "complete state" means
 > 
 > All the data that your activity needs to restore its UI and underlying
 > model as it was when it was closed.

okay -- i'm beginning to understand the notion of "instance" more
completely, and the notion of any past instance in time being
resumable.  i didn't get that before.

 > >  -- that's pretty
 > >  daunting, esp. for a program that already saves a lot of state in
 > >  other ways.
 > 
 > In which other ways? Can you elaborate?

well, like many existing non-sugar programs, this program creates
a subdirectory in $HOME and saves some state there.  it's a mapping
program, so things like current location on the map, current zoom
level, name of of the GPS route being followed, the current GPS
track, etc.  also per-user configuration:  personal landmarks,
trips, previously saved tracks, etc.  (this app is clearly a long
way from being sugarized, and probably never will be.)

 > >  is there a minimum that i need to do / can do?  and
 > >  this is all accessed via DBUS?  that's not completely clear from
 > >  the page text.  (and again, a pointer to how to figure out how
 > >  to access the datastore/journal from non-python languages might
 > >  be useful.)
 > 
 > Some activities have already done that. One that comes to my mind is eToys.
 > 
 > You certainly don't need to implement state saving to the perfection.
 > Having something working quickly and then keep improving would make
 > sense.

i'll take a look at eToys.  clearly a minimum of "where on the map
was i?" might be good state to be able to resume.

 > that. The Journal is not supposed to access arbitrary data on the file
 > system. If you explain what you want to do with the logs someone might
 > be able to help.

as i wrote in the other mail, it was more of an assumption that i
made, that i should be able to see that data.  (it's actually not
very important, except to the developer.  but that happens to be me.  ;-)

paul
=---------------------
 paul fox, pgf at foxharp.boston.ma.us (arlington, ma, where it's 22.5 degrees)