Roku Developer Program

[groman00]

I have a Scene with two custom screens on it. One screen is a landing page with a RowList, containing multiple rows of videos. When a user selects an item from one of the rows, it will launch a video screen on top of the first screen. The goal is to have the content from the focused row on the first screen to be passed to the video screen, so there can be a single row at the bottom of the video player.

Passing the row content to the video screen is the easy part, but when I close the video player, the row content that I passed is missing from the landing screen. Clearly, my use if "appendChild" in the VideoScreen.brs code below is causing the original row content to change. I'm looking for a way to clone the row content, as to not affect the original content. Or possibly another way to structure my contentnode so I can easily pass nodes around without modifying them.

'' ** 
'' MainScreen.brs
'' **

function getPlaylistsContent()
    ? "loading playlists"

    m.playlistsContentRequest = createObject("roSGNode", "playlistsContentRequest")
    m.playlistsContentRequest.uri = m.top.playlistsContentUri
    m.playlistsContentRequest.observeField("content", "showPlaylists")
    m.playlistsContentRequest.control = "RUN"     
end function

sub showPlaylists()
    ? "showing playlists"

    m.playlists = m.playlistsContentRequest.content
end sub

function playlistItemSelected()
    print "this is how the playlist is passed to the video screen"
    
    m.videoScreen.playlist = m.playlists.getChild(m.rowItemSelected[0])
end function

'' **
'' PlaylistContentRequest.brs
'' **

sub getContent()
    util = Utils()
    content = createObject("RoSGNode", "ContentNode")    
    request = ParseJson(util.getStringFromURL(m.top.uri))
    response = request.response

    for each playlist in response.data.playlists
        playlistItem = content.createChild("ContentNode")
        playlistItem.title = playlist.name

        for each item in playlist.items
            videoData = item.video
            video = playlistItem.CreateChild("VideoItemData")
            video.title = videoData.title
            video.hdPosterURL = videoData.thumbnailList[1].url
            video.sdPosterURL = videoData.thumbnailList[2].url
        end for

    end for

    m.top.content = content
end sub

'' **
'' VideoScreen.brs
'' **

function playlistChanged()
    print "Playlist loaded to video screen" 
    
    data = CreateObject("roSGNode", "ContentNode")

    ''This is where I want to clone or shallow copy m.top.playlist
    data.appendChild(m.top.playlist)
    m.playlistRow.content = data
end function

Please help!

[TheEndless]

I was recently looking for similar functionality and found it couldn't be done in 7.0. My understanding is that there will be some new reflection methods in 7.1 that will make it possible to clone nodes like this, but for now you may need to either hard-code the fields, or, if it's a custom content node, parse the component XML with roXMLElement to get the fields via the <interface> node.

[groman00]

I was recently looking for similar functionality and found it couldn't be done in 7.0. My understanding is that there will be some new reflection methods in 7.1 that will make it possible to clone nodes like this, but for now you may need to either hard-code the fields, or, if it's a custom content node, parse the component XML with roXMLElement to get the fields via the <interface> node.

Thanks! I have a workaround for this now, which gets the job done. I'll keep an eye out for the 7.1 update.