unity-dev team mailing list archive

[Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen <mikkel.kamstrup@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 05/04/2012 03:48 AM, Sean Dague wrote:
> I'm working on a python lens for Unity in 12.04 for pidgin. The idea
> being that online buddies are searchable and by activating them a window
> will pop up to message them. I've got the search part of the scope
> pretty well under control, nice list of users with their buddy icons
> displayed, thanks to reading some of the one hundred scopes project.
> Most of this is communicating to pidgin over dbus, with a little
> cheating and looking through the xml file for icon file names.
>
> The part that I don't know how to do is catch the click/activate signal
> when the item is selected. Unlike most of the lenses, which are serving
> up a file or url, there isn't a url for openning a message to a buddy.
> However, if I can capture that event in any way, I can open the message
> window via a dbus call to pidgin.

This is definitely possible. You need to connect to the "activate-uri" 
signal on your Unity.Scope object 
(http://developer.ubuntu.com/api/ubuntu-12.04/python/Unity-5.0.html#Unity.Scope).

Then do what you must with the passed in URI and return 
Unity.ActivationResponse.new (Unity.HandledType.HIDE_DASH, uri).

You can check unity-lens-bliss, which does something similar except it 
uses SHOW_DASH, to create a browsing experience in the dash, where you 
can browse into app categories. See 
http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~unity-team/unity-lens-bliss/trunk/view/head:/bliss/apps.py#L91

Good luck!

Cheers,
Mikkel