Data Persistence

UNDER CONSTRUCTION --Wayn3w 05:59, 17 March 2008 (PDT)

Sometimes widgets take information from users that should be stored for later. For instance, if a user changes the color of a screen by pressing on it, then when the widget next loads it should still use this color.

Persisting to Chumby Servers: The Chumby Parameter Service

• persists across Chumby reboots
• may take longer because of network fetches
• a tad more complex

Widgets can can save and restore data by exchanging XML with a web service developed for this purpose. When a widget first loads, the parameter _root._chumby_widget_instance_href stores the URL of the service the widget should use to exchange XML-encoded parameters (the configuration widget should use _root._chumby_instance_url). The flow usually proceeds this way:

• widget construction: request any saved data via XML.load (the widget will be notified of later be notified by XML.onLoad)
• XML.onLoad: read the data from the resulting XML, perform necessary actions.

Later, when data needs to be saved to the server:

• widget invokes XML.sendAndLoad to send data to the widget service to save.

Persisting Locally: Mobile Shared Objects

This involves using objects of the SharedObject class. An excellent tutorial for the using them is Persistent data: Saving user preferences and game scores. Things to note about them are:

• they are stored in /tmp/pdata, but it is not easily readable
• they will be removed when a Chumby restarts.
• flashplayer does not support shared objects, so this will have to be tested on the Chumby.

General Approach

• Since it uses a callback rather than listener pattern, the handler will not have the context of the instance. hence if the callback needs to invoke a method on an instance, then it will have to refer to an instance that is stored globally.

MTASC Issues

MTASC has an older, incomplete definition for SharedObject. The file SharedObject.as (on Linux stored in /usr/share/mtasc/std/SharedObject.as) will have to be edited to include the following code:

static function addListener(objectName:String, notifyFunction:Function): Void;
static function removeListener(objectName:String): Void;

Also, SharedObject is defined as intrinsic, but not dynamic class, so it is not possible to have private data -- that is, data on the shared object that will not persist. This is not necessarily a detriment, because in an object-oriented project there will be other places to store private data. Note that this makes it difficult to derive a new class from SharedObject.

Debugging

trace() is your friend.