[launcher] activating a place entry does not show the activated arrow

[Florian Boucault]

When a place is activated, its corresponding shortcut in the launcher should indicate that it is indeed activated by showing the typical arrow on its right hand side.

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

Because of bug #684152 ([dash] list of places is hardcoded), this issue is non-trivial to fix and involves hacks to synchronize the 'current_page' property of the dash to the 'active' property of place entries. The branch linked implements that, but we should probably fix bug #684152 first.

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

Unfortunately my assumption in comment #1 was over-optimistic. The list of place entries in the dash is now dynamic, but it’s not shared with the launcher, so their states are not synchronized.

The D-Bus interface of the place daemons (com.canonical.Unity.PlaceEntry) doesn’t expose an "active" property either.

So it seems that my original solution, deemed back then as a hack, is in fact the only solution we have at hand.

[Florian Boucault (fboucault)]

I will look into that. 3 possible solutions then:
- either your hack is sufficient and acceptable
- or we synchronise the states of the launcher and the dash over D-Bus
- or we push to have an "active" property in the backend side

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

> - either your hack is sufficient and acceptable

I believe my "hack" is acceptable, but I probably need to re-work it a bit to fit changes in the code base.

> - or we synchronise the states of the launcher and the dash over D-Bus

This is roughly what my original implementation does already: it adds an "activePlaceEntry" property to the dash and an "activePlaceEntryChanged" signal to the dash’s D-Bus interface, which the place entries in the launcher monitor to update accordingly their "active" property.

[Florian Boucault (fboucault)]

Fantastic, let's go for that then.