Re: Programmatic control over emblems?

[David Zeuthen <david fubar dk>]

On Thu, 2009-07-23 at 22:27 +1200, Richard Schwarting wrote:
> Hello.
> 
> I feel like I'm missing something obvious here.  I've an application
> that uploads photos and I have been trying to get it to add an emblem
> to files it has uploaded so I know they're done.  I've tried doing
> something like this (not sure if this is remotely right, the docs for
> GEmblem and friends aren't the most thorough):
> 
>     GFileIcon *emblem_icon = g_file_icon_new (...);
>     GEmblem *emblem = g_emblem_new (emblem_icon);
> 
>     /* I have a GFileInfo* image_info from earlier */
>     GIcon *old_icon = g_file_info_get_icon (image_info);
>     GIcon *new_icon = g_emblemed_icon_new (image_info, emblem);
>     g_file_set_icon (new_icon);
> 
> Sadly, this has no impact on the .nautilus/metadata/ files for the
> relevant locations and no emblems appear as intended.  I noticed that
> NautilusFileInfo also has an emblem add API, but thought that GEmblem
> might be more appropriate since it's all Flashy and stuff.
> 
> I hope this is the right list, even though it concerns gio APIs, since
> it concerns emblems, but I'll happily be redirected if I'm wrong :)

Just looking at the commits Alex did, this worked for me

 $ touch Desktop/foo.txt

 $ gvfs-set-attribute ~/Desktop/foo.txt -t stringv \
     metadata::keyword new urgent

and hitting ctrl+r in Nautilus makes this stuff appear (this is probably
supposed to be happening automatically).

 $ gvfs-info ~/Desktop/foo.txt |grep metadata
  metadata::icon_position: 64,422
  metadata::icon_scale: 1
  metadata::icon_position_timestamp: 1248385424
  metadata::keyword: [new, urgent]

My installed copy of Nautilus may be out of date since

http://git.gnome.org/cgit/nautilus/tree/libnautilus-private/nautilus-metadata.h

suggests the metadata key is 'emblems', not 'keyword'.

Anyway, you can do this programatically via g_file_info_set_attribute()
using G_FILE_ATTRIBUTE_TYPE_STRINGV for @type and "metadata::keyword"
for @attribute (see programs/gvfs-set-attribute.c in the gvfs sources
for details). 

(Hmm, it would probably be nice with a g_file_info_set_attribute_strv()
convenience function. And also nice to have #defines for things like
"metadata::keyword" or whatever it ends up being called.)

Hope this helps.

    David