Redraw/Remove Gui

Renoise Tool Development
1

Hello,

on a certain event, I would like to redraw my GUI. To build up a gui I use:

vb = renoise.ViewBuilder()   
.. fill with buttons etc..

How to destroy/remove this vb?
With again declaring vb in the same way, a second gui popups, but the old gui stays. Also vb = nil does not have any effect.

2

A vb only creates new GUI elements. If you want to remove previously added view components, you can do so via:
my_view:remove_child(some_child_view)

See https://code.google.com/p/xrnx/source/browse/trunk/Documentation -> Renoise.ViewBuilder.API.lua for more info

3

Thanks. Then there would be a my_view:remove_all_childs very helpful.
You either can not remove an former created dialog, can you?

app():show_custom_dialog
4

To remove all views with a single “remove_child” call, add all your views into one “big” parent view. Like for example a row, column. Then you only need to remove this row or rack to get rid of everything…

5

Thank you.

But when putting my views into one big parent view, I got an error, when recreating/adding the previously removed view again:

*** std::logic_error: 'ViewBuilder: a view with the id 'track_number1' was already registered to this viewbuilder instance.'  
*** stack traceback:

The child view I added to the parent view has the id “track_number”…i

  
 local track_number = vb:popup {  
 id = 'track_number'..i,  
 bind = tracks[i].track_number,  
 value = tracks[i].track_number.value,  
 width = 80,  
 items = track_names  
 }  
 lights_rows[i]:add_child(track_number)  
...

Do I have to remove explicit all views with a certain id? (Removing a parent view does not automatically remove all id’s of the child views?)

6

Cie: Could you let us know what exactly you need/want to do? Its about recreating or updating the step sequencer GUI, isn’t it? What do you want to do there? I think it makes more sense to find a solution for this special case, your tool.

Re: ‘ViewBuilder: a view with the id ‘track_number1’ was already registered to this viewbuilder instance.’

You can use as many “ViewBuilder”'s you need or want. Even multiple ones per GUI, dialog. They only hold view IDs in a table, you can later on access and do the construction of views.

If you anyway have locals of your views, like here:
local track_number = vb:popup {
id = ‘track_number’…i
}

then you don’t need an ID at all, and could collect, memorize the view object directly in a table.

But as said above: Let us know what exactly you need to do in your tool, and lets try to find a solution for exactly this problem instead.

7

Thank you Taktik for your will to help, it is really appreciated. :)
Sorry for the late reply, unfortunately I had the last weeks no time due to work.

Yes this question refers to the StepSequencer. What I would like to do in my GUI is to add/remove dynamically a row of steps (that represents a track), if the user adds/removes a track. So when the Sequencer Gui is visible, and the user removes a track or adds one, a new row of steps becomes visible or gets removed.
As there is no possibility to check which track-number exactly was removed (only in general, that the amount of tracks has changed is observable), I had the idea to remove all rows of steps from the gui, parse all tracks, and add for each track a row again. Unfortunately I use IDs for each row to adress them from anywhere within the application; and when recreating the rows (with the same IDs) there is an error not to use the same ID again. At this point I got stuck.
If the gui is closed completely after a new track is added/removed, and then reloaded through clicking on the menue entry, it works well. Unfortunately I do not know how to close and restart the gui with a lua command.
If you know a way how to solve this problem, it would be great. Thank you anyway for your effort and your help.

8

Info about what exactly happened to the tracks (or patterns, instruments and so on list) is passed as “notification” argument to the notifier:
See GitHub - renoise/xrnx: The official Renoise Lua Scripting repository for more info please.

For a removed track you will get the following argument passed to your notifier: {
type = “remove”,
index = track_index which got removed
}

If the view builder IDs are then still in your way, then use a builder per track you are showing, or clear old IDs before assigning new ones:
vb.views[“some_view”] = nil – then create new views with the same id and same view builder

1 Like
9

Thank you very much, that solved my gui update problem.