[Sugar-devel] [Activities] using the browser to display help/docs

[Tomeu Vizoso]

On Sun, Feb 22, 2009 at 19:16,  <pgf at laptop.org> wrote:
> i promised simon on irc that i'd raise this on the sugar devel
> list, so thanks for replying and reminding me.
>
> (to recap:  my "legacy" activity would like to be able to present
> help and documentation info to the user via the local browser.)
>
> s page wrote:
>  > pgf at laptop.org wrote:
>  > > can someone remind me if there's any reasonable way for an
>  > > activity to display html help or documentation using Browse?
>  > >
>  > > normally i'd simply have the app run "firefox file:///path-to-file",
>  > > but that won't work.
>  >
>  > In candidate-800, Browse can view
>  > file:///home/olpc/Activities/Maze.activity/activity/activity-maze.svg ,
>  > so you would think you could tell it to launch and show your HTML help.
>  >
>  > I dunno if Rainbow restricts one activity from launching another.
>
> i believe it does, which has always been the problem for doing what
> i would like to do.
>
> i think what might be useful (if rainbow is to be accomodated) is
> a minimal-functionality html viewer.  i'd be okay, in my
> activity, if the viewer didn't allow any off-page clicks or
> scripts -- just html rendering.  doesn't seem like that would
> cause a security issue, would it?

Another possibility is for Sugar to provide a dialog similar to the
object chooser and view source windows with the mozilla widget
embedded there.

What would people prefer?

Thanks,

Tomeu

> paul
>
>
>  > Ignoring that, you would think you could run one activity from another
>  > using a) Python code, b) exec(), or c) DBus.
>  > a) I couldn't figure out Journal's Start/Resume code, it seems to reach
>  > into datastore and activityfactory, which ends up invoking DBus.
>  >
>  > b) From Terminal Activity you would think that
>  >    sugar-activity -u 'file:///{PATH_TO_YOUR_ACTIVITY}/myhtml/help.html'
>  > would work, but I can't even get the sugar-activity exec line in
>  > Activities/Browse.activity/activity/activity.info to work.  The
>  > connection between its BUNDLE_ID, ACTIVITY_ID, OBJECT_ID and an
>  > activity's metadata like service_name is a mystery to me.
>  >
>  > >  are there any workarounds (like tricking the
>  > > file to be in the journal so that browse can see it, or something like
>  > > that?
>  >
>  > You could write code to display the HTML within your own activity...
>  >
>  > >   how does the new pdf-in-browse trick work?
>  >
>  >  From
>  > http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings/2008/10/14/14th-october-2008/ ,
>  > "Wrote a small PDF viewer tool with support for the Journal which is
>  > then used by mozplugger to show PDF files within Browse. (You can put
>  > the file in your journal if you like it)"
>  >
>  > I.e. he's taking code that displays PDFs and running it inside the
>  > browser as a plug-in.  That seems unrelated to what you're trying to do.
>  >
>  > Disclaimer: I have written four lines of Python code and zero activities ;-)
>  > --
>  > =S Page
>
> =---------------------
>  paul fox, pgf at laptop.org
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