Layering in Clutter

[Timbob steve <timbobsteve gmail com>]

Hi All,

I am working on a thumbnailing patch for docDisplayItem, but am having issues with the Clutter layering and display code.

Here is my patch so far:
    http://pastebin.com/m1efad341

It mostly works (with the exception of prettying up the code and display stuff), but as you can see, if you go over items and have their thumbnail display, they are often being displayed behind items lower in the list. For a greater example of what is happening you can set the display thumbnail's position to 1/2 the screen size and the thumbnail is completely hidden behind the workspaces view.

Now, I was thinking that it might be possible to anchor the thumbnail against the entire scene, that way it displays over the top of everything when "this._previewThumbnail.raise_top()" is called it would be displayed over all other actors.

Another thought was to make the preview-thumbnail a top-level actor, but I can't find any way to retrieve the global Clutter.Group() (not even sure if there is one).

Anyone got any thoughts on what to do to fix the "layering" issue?

NB: There is also an issue that is more pronounced with the thumbnailing code, where mouse-over events aren't actually triggered upon the mouse entering an actors space. They are instead generated after the mouse enters the actor's space => Pauses => then moves the mouse within the actor for >= 1px. Not sure if this is just an issue with running the code in Xephyr, or somewhere inbetween the Window Management code and passing events to _javascript_.

Regards,
Timbobsteve.