Is it possible to jump to a previous activity (not the previous page) from another activity? What I want is the following:

I'm using 'Activity X'. From 'Activity X' I can jump to 'Activity Y'. 'Activity Y' consists of many pages. If I've made my choice in 'Activity Y' I want to jump back to the page I've left at 'Activity X'.
I want to create a 'jump to previous activity' in 'Activity Y'

Can this be done?

You could do it with global variables.

I've created a config where the Home key behaves differently depending on where you are, and I do it by storing the prontoscript name of where the home key should take you when I enter a page. You could probably do a similar thing when you leave an activity.

As long as you are willing to write some prontoscript code the answer is yes.

You just have to understand how jumps work and the fact that when entering an activity from another activity the code at the activity level will run. When jumping between pages of a single activity the code at the activity level is not run.

This is important to understand as most times some of the code at the activity level is there to initialize things which you may not want initialized on an inter page jump to other than the main page.

In my practice, I do all initializations by calls from the pages "start up" code. The actual initialization code is at the activity level, but it's execution is called for at the page level.

OK, there's no real easy solution then. Since I know nothing about prontoscript (or javascript) this would be too difficult for me. I'll create a 'device' page, I guess. That way I can choose to which 'activity' I want to go to.

The thing I want to accomplish is the following. My receiver has many 'soundfields'. I want to be able to switch soundfields from any activity, such as 'watch blu-ray/dvd', 'watch movie', 'listen to cd', 'listen to sacd' etc. So I made an activity 'soundfields' that I can jump to from any other activity. When I've chosen the right soundfield I want to go back to my originating activity, so I can use the transport again. Is this such a strange setup?

the "Browse backward" function will do this...

No, this will browse backward through all pages you've been browsing. So if you've been hopping between 2 pages 5 times, you'll need to 'browse backward' 11 times...

sorry mis-under stood what you were trying to do...

The prontoscript code is actually quite simple. If you want I will help you offline via normal eMail (my email is in my profile).

On each page you wish to be able to return to, you will need to set using prontoscript, a global string being the name of the page, calling it something like "MyLastPage" e.g.
System.setGlobal("MyLastPage",CF.page().label)

On the "return" button in your sound field selector, you will add some prontoscript code, to get the value of MyLastPage from global storage and then you will execute the actions of some hidden button based on what MyLastPage was set to. e.g.

CF.widget(System.getGlobal("MyLastPage"),"Jumps").executeActions();


You will need a hidden page whose protoscript name (its tag) is "Jumps", containing a bunch of buttons, one for each possible page you want to return to. The buttons Prontoscript name (its tag) will be the name of the page you want to return to (what got stored as MyLastPage in global storge), and its action will be a jump to the correct page of the correct activity.

Not hard and actually a simple exercise to cut ones baby teeth in ProntoScript. The ability to freely jump between pages and activities is not simple in Prontoscript as you must always Jump" via the actions of a button. It would have been much nicer if Prontoscript implemented a direct jump function without needing the "Button Crutch"

Hope that helps

Barry,

This works. Thanks!

Dennis

Just to verify, if you are only ever wanting to jump to activity Y from activity X and back again, browse backward does work.

for example i have a link to a lighting control page on my remote which jumps from say the dvd page to lights then set a key with browse backwards and it simply returns to the page you were on last, and with no further browse backwards commands available you stop there.

not saying you shouldn't use pronto script but for those not able to its a good way to achieve what you want.

Browse backward works well when there is not a possibility to Page Up/Down or jump to a second page. One excellent example is a TV Aspect Ratio page.

A not-so excellent example is a Receiver Surround Mode/Levels activity. In this case, you'd want to make the Levels page hidden and/or put in 2nd activity, especially if you use a FirmKey like Firm1 to Browse Backward.

I speak from experience in this area. If you have questions or would like me to comment further, just ask. :)

I've used this technique and it seems to work, but in the ProntoScript Console I get "ProntoScript error: ActionList Error" citing the ....executeActions() line in the script as the problem. This was running in the simulator, not on the actual control panel. If I wasn't running the ProntoScript Console, I never would have known.

Any thoughts?

That is not a real error, but rather a warning as all items in the action list after the jump will be ignored, i.e. the execution of the action list stops after the jump takes plaace. The Pronto deals with it just fine.

Thanks. Just what I needed to know.

You can hide this error using Try/Catch. If you get an error that as a string matches this text, you can choose to ignore it. For others, simply issue throw e where 'e' is the error you caught.