Soft scheduling widgets
From SpinetiX Support Wiki
Description
The soft scheduling widgets detailed below were designed to be used for those cases where certain medias need to be displayed during certain periods of time (e.g., during workdays, during lunch break etc.), but without being too strict on the starting / ending times. With other words, you are going to define the period(s) during which a particular media is valid to be displayed.
Soft schedule widget
When the widget is opened within Elementi, the calendar panel is enabled allowing to schedule media items, however, the inline calendar is simply used to determine if there's a valid media to display at the current time or not.
- If there is a valid media, it will play that media one time, after which it will end itself. The media may be displayed after the scheduled end-time without being truncated.
- If there is no valid media, it will end itself, either after the default image duration or immediately.
Another advantage of this widget is that it can be included into a playlist as a way to condition the display of certain slides of that playlist; if there is no valid media at the current time, the soft schedule widget can be configured to close immediately, in which case the playlist will advance to the next slide.
The following properties, found under the "Properties" tab in Edit panel, can be used to customize the widget:
- Default image duration
- Enter a duration to be used for images.
- When there's no valid media
- Controls the widget ending behavior in the case there's no valid media to be displayed. Select between "Wait for default duration" and "End immediately". The latter can be used when the widget is included into a playlist, so that the next slide is started immediately.
Playlist of scheduled media
This widget is a customized version of the basic playlist allowing adding schedules (.ics files) as slides within the playlist and thus enabling a mix of regular media files (for which the time of the day is not important) with media files that need to be played only during a certain period of the day.
When an item of the playlist corresponds to a schedule file (.ics), the widget will check the content inside that schedule and if a valid media is found, that media is played for a certain duration (as explained below), otherwise the playlist will automatically switch to the next item in the list.
- Images are played for the default duration specified in the playlist.
- Videos are played once, for their entire duration.
- Animations (i.e., svg files) are played for the duration specified inside them.
Notes:- The schedule is checked only at the starting time of the item, meaning that the media inside might be played outside the scheduled period in some cases (for instance, a long video file).
- The schedule file(s) must be in the same folder as the widget.