How can I simulate keypress from within brightscript?

Archived
1

So my goal is to make the poster screen a little less annoying to use if it is initialized with only one playlist.

Currently, if you go to the poster screen with a single playlist, the user’s focus is on the playlist name and the user has to hit the down arrow to allow selection of videos. This is lame. If there’s only a single option, you shouldn’t have a UI focus point for it.

So, first, I looked at the API for roPosterScreen to see if I can manually set the selection and focus of items. But I cannot.

So, then, I looked for any documentation for how to simulate keypress events and found nothing for inside of Brightscript.

I do have the “external control” pdf file, that suggests using a POST to the roku box itself. So I tried this (posting on the localhost):

Function simulateKeypress( key as String ) As Void
    url = "http://127.0.0.1:8060/keydown/" + key
    print "Simulating keypress: " key " as url " url 
    http = CreateObject("roUrlTransfer")
    http.SetUrl( url )
    http.PostFromString( "\r\n\r\n" )
End Function

But it didn’t do anything useful.

Anybody have any ideas?

2

The Roku doesn’t support the loopback address, but you can get the IP address from the roDeviceInfo. There’s an example in the in the roPosterScreen section of the component reference that uses the same method to launch the channel store from within a channel.

3

“migmigmig” wrote:
Currently, if you go to the poster screen with a single playlist, the user’s focus is on the playlist name and the user has to hit the down arrow to allow selection of videos. This is lame. If there’s only a single option, you shouldn’t have a UI focus point for it.
Are you referring to the filter banner (categories) at the top? If so, just don’t use SetListNames and it won’t be there.

-JT

4

Cool, omitting ‘SetListNames’ fixes that.

I’ll look further into trying to pull the box IP so I can send keystrokes to myself. I didn’t see any sample code for that in the “roPosterScreen” section of the ComponentReference.pdf, but I’ll keep on greppin.

mig

5

“migmigmig” wrote:
Cool, omitting ‘SetListNames’ fixes that.

I’ll look further into trying to pull the box IP so I can send keystrokes to myself. I didn’t see any sample code for that in the “roPosterScreen” section of the ComponentReference.pdf, but I’ll keep on greppin.

mig
Make sure you’ve downloaded the latest 2.9 version of the SDK. The relevant sample code is…

function channelStoreGetFullVersion()
    di = CreateObject("roDeviceInfo")
    ipAddrs = di.GetIPAddrs()
    ipAddr = ipAddrs.eth0
    REM See the ECP document examples for how to obtain your plugin ID
    url = "http://"+ ipAddr +":8060/launch/11?contentID=<PluginID>"
    bodyString = ""
    print "roku url: "; url
    port = CreateObject("roMessagePort")
    request = createObject("roUrlTransfer")
    request.setPort(port)
    request.setUrl(url)
    response = request.asyncPostFromString(bodyString)
    while true
        msg = wait(0, port)
        if type(msg) = "roUrlEvent"
            if msg.getInt() = 1 then
                print "Response code: "; msg.GetResponseCode()
                if msg.GetResponseCode() = 404
                    response = invalid
                else
                    response = msg.getString()
                end if
                exit while
            end if
        end if
    end while
    return response
end function

The eth0 is specific to the wired adapter, so you’ll need to adjust based on the active network connection.