Month: September 2019

Developing for older Samsung TVs

If you already have a Samsung TV and want to start developing for it chances are you don’t have the latest and greatest model. But when you install the Tizen development tools they only target 2 operating system versions; the latest version that is out now and the version that is yet to be released in a year or so. Your TV is too old! So what can you do?

If you check the Tizen development forums the suggestion is to install an older version of the development tools. But that’s no fun! And it is possible to develop for the older TVs with the newer tools. Go ahead and install the latest versions of the Tizen development Studio first. While that is installing you will need to download an older version of the Extensions for TV. You can find them at this site. As you scroll through the available versions you will see that if you attempt to get a version older than the 3.0 version you can’t download it. Download the 3.1 or 4.0 extensions. Don’t worry, the  extensions also contain the components needed for TV’s running the 2.3 and 2.4 Tizen version.

tizen extension for tizen sdk

After Tizen Development Studio is installed open the package manager. In the upper right corner of the package manager is a gear icon. Select it.

 

packagemaker

Expand the “Extensions SDK” area of the window to see the extensions installed and click on the + button to add an extension. A window opens asking for a URL. Leave the URL blank and click on the three dots next to it. You’ll now be asked to navigate to a local archive of the extension you with to add. Navigate to the file that you downloaded earlier and select it.  The package manager will take a few moments to install the extension.

When you attempt to create a new project and look at the TV templates available there’s only the 4.0 and 5.0 projects. What gives? The missing project templates can be found under the Custom projects. Select “TV-Samsung v3.0.” Even if you have a TV running Tizen 2.3 this opeion will work. When you click the next button you’ll see the familiar project templates.

Listing Applications on a Tizen Device

In a Tizen project I was working on I found that Tizen Web alone wasn’t enough to help me accomplish my goal. For some of the functionality that I needed a native application would be needed (more on that in another blog post). Rather than completely write the application in native code I was going to use HTML for the UI and a native service for other functionality. This is a Tizen Hybrid application.

The Tizen documentation wasn’t quite clear to me on what identifier to use when trying to launch a service packaged with an HTML application. It mentions using the App ID. This didn’t work for me. I only figured out the right name to use when I tried listing all of the applications and services on the device.

Getting a list of the applications and services is done through tizen.application.getAppsInfo. This function takes as a parameter a callback. The call back is given a list of the applications installed on the device. For my purposes I was only interested in the id member of the objects that were passed back.

  

tizen.application.getAppsInfo(
    function onListInstalledApps(applications) {
        console.log("List of Applications:");
        applications.forEach(
          function(app) {
    		console.log(`  app.id: ${app.id}`);
        });
    });

Once I saw the output of this it was easy to identify the problem I encountered with launching the service.

Screen Shot 2019-05-24 at 10.38.17 AM
Output of app listing code

According to the Tizen documentation when launching a service the ID string used is composed of the package ID and the app ID of the service. The package ID can be found in the confix.xml for the web application.  In the following you can see the package ID is “IVFd9Or08P”.

Screen Shot 2019-05-24 at 4.34.54 PM

The app ID can be found in then tizen-manifest.xml for the service project.

Screen Shot 2019-05-24 at 4.37.53 PM

The app ID here is “org.sample.service.” If you look in the output from the code sample for listing installed applications you will see that the service shows up as IVFd9Or08P.testservice. It is using the entry from the “exec” field instead of the appid field. I’m not sure why the documentation points to the appid only. But I’m happy to have figured out this problem.