Plugin Menus

[SilentStorm]

Client: 12.01.2012 15:22:23

While the ability to finally add Menu Items to the Client & Channel Context Menu as well as to the global Menu Bar is certainly nice it is also quite useless in its current state imho.


Some things that came to mind:

• You HAVE to create all your Items in one place.
• You CANNOT change your Items in any way once created.
• You CANNOT remove your Items in any way.
• It is generally way too abstract.

Suggestions:

• It would be nice if you just had a few Functions on ts3Functions Struct like these:
  
  • QAction* addMenuItem(PluginMenuType type, char* name = 0, char* IconPath = 0);
  • void removeMenuItem(QAction* menuItem);
  • void renameMenuItem(QAction* menuItem); // Not really required.

Advantages:

• Being able to create / change / remove Menu Items anywhere at anytime.
• Giving Developers full Control over their Menu Items by actually returning the QAction Pointer.
• Eliminate the need for the #define's
• Eliminate the need for the Helper Function
• Eliminate the need to know upfront how many Items one could possibly need at any given time
• Allow for Menu Items to be hidden / disabled in certain situations
• Make the Feature actually usable.

Disadvantage:

• Developers would need to download the Qt Source.

While there is also the (rather small) disadvantage of having to have the Qt Source available I think the advantages clearly outrank the disadvantage.

[PeterS]

I don't like the idea of accessing Qt code from plugins. While this can be optional, it shouldn't be necessary just to implement those menus. I prefer a way to do menus without Qt. Besides that, some plan for the future is to move plugins in an own executable (just like Firefox or Chrome execute plugins in a plugin container) to avoid plugins crashing the whole TeamSpeak client (I see quite some crashdumps because of this). So once this happens, any access to Qt won't be possible anymore.

A mechanism to add/remove and enable/disable plugin items should be possible with the current plugin menu system.

[SilentStorm]

Using this Thread again since it is related...

There is no way to create Separators with the current System and most of the above is still not possible.

I'd like to request to ability to actually create Separators (QAction::setSeparator(true)). If you really don't want to return the QAction Pointer then you could just do a setSeparator(true) if the MenuItem Text is either a single or three dash(es) as iirc this creates a separator in most cases.

For disabling Menu Items there is setPluginMenuEnabled now but it is only really helpful for Global Menu Items (never found any use for that btw) as you cannot conditionally disable Client / Channel Menu Entries since you don't receive any kind of Notification when such a Menu is created. There would need to be some kind of Callback which gets called when the Menu is requested which includes the Channel / Client ID on which the Context Menu was requested. That way one could disable the Item on instances where it makes no sense to have it.

Still cannot dynamically add / remove Menu Items.

[SilentStorm]

Yet another Menu Related Issue / Request:

Current System unfortunately doesn't allow to structure the Menu.

I'd like to request being able to create SubMenus instead of being forced to have everything on the same level which makes it very huge, ugly and confusing. If there were to be a way we could actually structure the menu that would go a long way I think.
This should even be possible with the current Implementation by either adding a parent Parameter or by splitting on Backslashes to indicate a Structure.
So

CREATE_MENU(CHANNEL, 0, "Foo", "foo.png");
CREATE_MENU(CHANNEL, 1, "My Category", "cat1.png");
CREATE_MENU(CHANNEL, 2, "My Category\\Do something", "do1.png");
CREATE_MENU(CHANNEL, 3, "My Category\\Do nothing", "do2.png");
CREATE_MENU(CHANNEL, 4, "Bar", "bar.png");
// Shortened because too lazy to type all the long stuff ;)

would display like this

My Plugin Menu Name
    Foo
    My Category
        Do something
        Do nothing
    Bar

instead of

My Plugin Menu Name
    Foo
    Do something
    Do nothing
    Bar

With the addition of above suggested Separators it would improve the look a lot

[Keyinator]

Yet another Menu Related Issue / Request:

Current System unfortunately doesn't allow to structure the Menu.

I'd like to request being able to create SubMenus instead of being forced to have everything on the same level which makes it very huge, ugly and confusing. If there were to be a way we could actually structure the menu that would go a long way I think.
This should even be possible with the current Implementation by either adding a parent Parameter or by splitting on Backslashes to indicate a Structure.
So

CREATE_MENU(CHANNEL, 0, "Foo", "foo.png");
CREATE_MENU(CHANNEL, 1, "My Category", "cat1.png");
CREATE_MENU(CHANNEL, 2, "My Category\\Do something", "do1.png");
CREATE_MENU(CHANNEL, 3, "My Category\\Do nothing", "do2.png");
CREATE_MENU(CHANNEL, 4, "Bar", "bar.png");
// Shortened because too lazy to type all the long stuff ;)

would display like this

My Plugin Menu Name
    Foo
    My Category
        Do something
        Do nothing
    Bar

instead of

My Plugin Menu Name
    Foo
    Do something
    Do nothing
    Bar

With the addition of above suggested Separators it would improve the look a lot

Has this been added so far or is there any reason against it?