Solid

Introduction

With Solid, KDE developers are able to easily write applications with hardware interaction features. The necessary abstraction to support cross-platform application development is provided by Solid's clear and comprehensive API.

Its aim is not the control of the devices (Solid doesn't let you synchronize your mobile phone with your local address book): Solid looks for devices and gives you access to the information it has about them. This way, you could easily look at the functions of the cpu, or at the driver that handles your camera, or the mount point of your usb pen. In sum: it gives you the possibility of "seeing without touching" your devices.

Now you would ask (at least, I asked myself): "Why should I need this library? I want to control the available hardware, not just see it!"

Well, Solid helps you a lot again: for any device interface, it gives you enough information to easily access it using other libraries or stacks. This way, if you want to manage your camera, you can use Solid to recognize it (you can use Solid::Notifier that will let you know when your camera has been plugged in), and then you can ask Solid to give you the information you need to handle it, for example with GPhoto or any other library you can think of. The same applies for any other plugged device: DVB cards (once recognized, Solid gives you the name of the associated device), audio cards (you can use ALSA, OSS or whatever you want: Solid knows the data to access it), portable media players, network cards, etc. Moreover, it lets you check if you're connected to any network or not, and you can use Solid to tell the system to connect (that is, you can ask Solid: "Give me access to the network, I don't want to care about details").

Anyway, some other things need to be said about network devices and Bluetooth. For these two classes of devices, Solid provides the "Control" namespace: that is, it lets you control them directly, without using external libraries. This means that with Solid, you can even handle your wireless or wired network interfaces, associate them to an essid, and choose ip configuration for them. You can even access your phone through Bluetooth, and so on.

Device Discovery

Listing Devices

Our first program will be a simple console based app that gets a list of all the hardware devices and prints them out to the screen.

auto notifier = Solid::DeviceNotifier::instance();

This gets us the device manager. All the devices are queried through and returned from the device manager. Once we have the list of devices we can interact with them as follows:

for(const Solid::Device &device : Solid::Device::allDevices()) {
    // print the name of device
    qDebug() << device.udi();
}

device.udi() returns the Unique Device Identifier for the device as a QString. Even if you have more than one identical device, the UDI is guaranteed to be unique. For example if you have a MythTV box with two PVR-250 T.V. capture cards in it, you will be able to refer to card #1 and #2 by their respective UDI.

Searching for specific devices

This second program makes uses of filters built into the solid framework. Using these filters you can list only devices according to supported capabilities, sub-devices of a given parent, and various predicates. In our example we'll be limiting our list to only audio hardware. A full list of capabilities can be viewed under the Solid::Capability namespace.

auto notifier = Solid::DeviceNotifier::instance();
    
// get a list of all devices that are AudioHw
const auto devices = Solid::Device::listFromType(Solid::DeviceInterface::AudioInterface, QString());
for (const Solid::Device &device : devices)
{
   qDebug() << device.udi().toLatin1().constData();
}

In this example Solid::DeviceManager::findDevicesFromQuery looks for a device with any parent and the Solid::Capability::AudioHw capability. If we had wanted to specify an AudioHw device with the parent "real_specific_parent" it would look like this:

Solid::Device::listFromType(Solid::Capability::AudioHw, QStringLiteral("real_specific_parent"));

From QML

You can also access the list of devices from QML.

Solid.Devices {
    id: allDevices
}
 
Solid.Devices {
    id: networkShares
    query: "IS NetworkShare"
}
 
Solid.Devices {
    id: mice
    query: "PointingDevice.type == 'Mouse'"
}
 
Text {
    text: "Total number of devices: " + allDevices.count
}
 
Text {
    text: "NFS url: " + networkShares.device(
        networkShares.devices[0], "NetworkShare"
    ).url
}

What do we do with a device once we get it?

Now that we got a device, what do we do with it? First let's look at the relationship between the Solid::Device and Solid::Capability. A Solid::Device can contain many Solid::Capability. A device can be tested to have a capability in the following way:

auto notifier = Solid::DeviceNotifier::instance();

// get a Processor
const auto list = Solid::Device::listFromType(Solid::DeviceInterface::Processor, QString());

// take the first processor
Solid::Device device = list[0];
if (device.is<Solid::Processor>()) {
    qDebug() << "We've got a processor!";
} else {
    qDebug() << "Device is not a processor.";
}

auto processor = device.as<Solid::Processor>();
qDebug() << "This processors maximum speed is:" << processor->maxSpeed();

solid-hardware tool

Solid also provides solid-hardware, a command line tool to investigate available devices.

Listing udi for all installed devices:

solid-hardware5 list

Listing full details for all installed devices:

solid-hardware5 list details

Listing all audio hardware devices:

solid-hardware5 query 'IS AudioInterface'

Device Actions

When a new data device is inserted or detected by Solid, it gets added to the Device Notifier (a Plasma widget that is responsible for handling device events), Places list and other relevant areas in the user interface.

Each device has a set of related actions which the user can perform on the device, depending on the device type and its contents. For example, when the media is an audio CD, the Device Notifier may offer to play that CD using Amarok. The default actions are not a part of Plasma Desktop, however; rather, each action is defined by a simple .desktop file that is installed by the application that handles the action (e.g. Amarok in our Audio CD example), and goes away when the application is removed.

You can add your own actions and modify existing ones using the Device Actions system setting module; however, such changes are limited to the user that requests the change. If you want to install a custom action along with your application, you have to dig a bit deeper.

Anatomy of an action

An Action file is a desktop configuration file similar to the following one:

[Desktop Entry]
X-KDE-Solid-Predicate=OpticalDisc.availableContent & 'Audio'
Type=Service
Actions=Play;

[Desktop Action Play]
Name=Play Audio CD with Amarok
Name[fr]=Jouer CD Audio avec Amarok
# names in other languages
Icon=amarok
Exec=amarok --cdplay %f

Actions and devices

The Device Notifier gets the devices and their corresponding actions by interrogating the hotplug Plasma DataEngine. The hotplug DataEngine gets the set of devices from Solid and the set of actions from the subdirectories ~/.local/share/solid/actions relative. The set of actions pertaining to each device is then obtained by evaluating the Solid Predicate specified in the action against the physical and logical properties of the device; if the predicate holds, the action is included. This is, of course, not limited to Plasma Desktop: any application can similarly query Solid for the same actions.

Action predicates

The predicate for each action is specified in the entry X-KDE-Solid-Predicate. The syntax of the predicate allows to construct an object of class Solid::Predicate out of it.

Atomic predicates can be of the form

• DeviceClass.attribute == value
• DeviceClass.attribute & value

the latter form meaning that the Solid attribute may have a set of values, and the specified value must be a part of that set.

For example, the predicate OpticalDisc.availableContent & 'Audio' means that the device medium is an optical disc and that it contains audio tracks and possibly something else, while the hypothetical predicate OpticalDisc.availableContent == 'Audio' means that a matching device contains audio tracks and nothing else.

Atomic predicates can be composed using the keywords AND and OR and parentheses. In practice, it is easiest to create a custom action with System Settings and peek the description from the custom action desktop file (within the user profile directory).

Executing actions

A matching action can be selected for execution by the user. When that happens, the command line in the Exec key of the action is executed given the device as a parameter. The location and value of the parameter is specified in the following way:

• %f Device mount point location, if applicable
• %d Device special file path
• %i Device identifier, as if returned by the command solid-hardware

So you are free to choose whatever command syntax your application supports. Note, however, that the forms %d and %i are deprecated by the Free Desktop standard and may be discontinued.

Installing actions

You install system-wide actions in the directory where the hotplug data engine will look for them (see above). The action is available immediately after installation.