If you normally use Extended view in a Playlist, you need to have an Artist column with a a width of zero (to prevent the Artist being shown in two places).
If you normally use Standard view in a Playlist, you will presumably (?) have an Artist column with a NON-zero width.
This makes it difficult to toggle between standard and extended Playlist views (try it!).
Therefore, I wonder whether toggling to Extended view should force the Artist column to be zero width; and toggling back to Standard view would use the specified (or default) Artist column width?
This is a problem related to the ColWidths setting, which interferes with the way the extended/simple mode is switched.
Virtual Treeview does not allow a column to have a width of 0. Instead, when you specify a width of 0 in skin.ini, the Visibility flag of the respective column is set to false, hiding the column in the first place.
Switching between simple and extended view mode has the same effect. It hides the artist column, and furthermore it instructs the paint algorithm to enlarge the height of the cells and paint the artist information below the title in the title column.
When you switch on extended mode while having set the artist column to a fixed width, you end up with the title being written twice. Likewise, switching back and forth leads to a chaotic situation.
In my opinion, the only clean solution would be to merge the artist and title column into one Virtual Treeview column in both setups. In extended display mode, mAirList would paint the artist below the title, just like now. In simple mode, mAirList would paint artist and title side by side, but still within the same “physical” column. (By the way, this is how mAirList 2.0 does with the old TDrawGrid component). Switching between simple and extended mode would not be a problem anymore, as the widths and visibility flags of all columns remain unchanged. Furthermore, we would have a gain of performance: At the moment, in simple mode, the comment and the progressbar are painted twice, the left hand part and the right hand part, each clipped to match the dimensions of the respective columns.
The drawback would be that the user cannot change the individual width of the artist or title column at runtime anymore. The space in the common column would be divided 50/50 by default. However, I could add an option to specify a different partitioning in skin.ini.
Apologies, Torben: somehow I missed seeing your replies?!!
I don’t have a problem with your proposed title-and-artist-in-one-column solution, provided I can specify the proportion of title/artist width in skin.ini, because my main music Playlist uses Extended mode but my Playlist for ads. uses Simple mode (with ad. title as Title and ad. customer as Artist, e.g.: 4 And 5 Seaters - Festival Cars), to save vertical space in my layout.
For the ‘second’ Playlist I would need to be able to say (for example) 60% Title/40% Artist.