Message

This Specification example shows the XML to pop up a system tray message balloon that states, "Ta-dah!! Your tag has been read!"

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<specification xmlns="http://www.touchatag.com/schema/configurator/specification-1.0">
    <application>
        <command id="default" name="Show balloon message"/>
    </application>
    <blueprint>
        <superblock id="urn:example:sample:message-app">
            <property name="Message"><text>Ta-dah!! Your tag has been read!</text></property>        
            <breakdown>
                <block id="ts" ref="urn:touchatag:block:text-source">
                    <property name="Value"><delegate as="Message"/></property>
                </block>
                <block id="m" ref="urn:touchatag:block:message"/>     
            </breakdown>
            <wiringscheme>
                <wire from="ts:out" to="m:in"/>
                <shunt from="m:out" to="action-out"/>
            </wiringscheme>
        </superblock>
    </blueprint>
</specification>

Explanation

Every Specification XML starts with the specification element. This element contains two elements, an application element and a blueprint element. The application element is used to advertise the tag-commands of the application, since this is a trivial application with only one logical tag-command, we can specify a basic tag-command. Following the recommendations, we will call it default.

Let's move on to the interesting part, being the blueprint. It should contain a superblock element, which requires an id attribute. Following the recommendations we will use the * id to illustrate its a don't care.

<blueprint>
    <superblock id="*">

A superblock element has the following child elements.

• property
• breakdown
• wiringscheme

breakdown

Now we can start to define and register our blocks in the elements blueprint.

 <breakdown>
 ...
 </breakdown>

A block element has the following attributes:

• id: unique identifier in the xml for this block
• ref: reference to an existing block provided by touchatag

So in this example we are going to use text-source and message blocks.

 <breakdown>
    <block id="ts" ref="urn:touchatag:block:text-source">

A block can have properties that we can set.In our example the text-source has a property.

 <breakdown>
    <block id="ts" ref="urn:touchatag:block:text-source">
        <property name="Value"><text>Ta-dah!! Your tag has been read!</text></property>
    </block>    

property

We can also specify properties in the blueprint xml. They are child elements of the superblock tag.

<superblock id="*">
    <property name="Message"><text>Ta-dah!! Your tag has been read!</text></property>

We can give a property a name. In the property element of a block we can delegate it through a global property.

 <breakdown>
    <block id="ts" ref="urn:touchatag:block:text-source">
        <property name="Value"><delegate as="Message"/></property>
    </block>    

In our example we are using the message property as a value in the text-source block.

wiringscheme

Our last step is wiring all the blocks together. We can do this in the wiringscheme element.

<wiringscheme>
    ...
</wiringscheme>

We have two types of wiring.

• wire: from an output pin to an input pin
  

  <wiringscheme>
      <wire from="ts:out" to="m:in" />
  

  We wire the text output pin of the text-source block with identifier ts to the text input pin of the message block m. The from and to attributes have to follow the Pin Endpoint syntax.

• shunt: from an input pin to an input pin or from an output pin to an output pin.
  

  <wiringscheme>
      ...
      <shunt from="m:out" to="action-out" />
  

  We shunt the output pin of the message block to the output pin of our superblock.

Troubleshooting

No pop-up on Windows

Make sure that this key in the Windows registry is set

• HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced
• DWORD EnableBalloonTips = 1

No pop-up on MacOS

Make sure that Growl is installed.