Boxee fails to load main.xml

[xarragon]

Hello, I'm playing around with app development in Boxee, and from time to time my application stops working, with no other error message than this:

18:04:51 T:2252 M:488927232   ERROR: Unable to load skin file special://home/apps/example/skin/Boxee Skin NG/720p/main.xml
18:04:51 T:2252 M:488935424   ERROR: Unable to retrieve window with id = 14000

I assume this is some sort of parsing error in the XML since I can get rid of it by cutting out portions of the XML. If so, is there really no other way to track down the offending code? I've already boosted the log level to debug and it makes no difference. It is really frustrating and time-consuming to have to do this by trial-and-error and having only binary results.

Any help appreciated.

[rockboxee]

Yep. that is most likely malformed xml somewhere.

The only tips I can give you is to use an editor that highlights matching brackets
and quotes, and look for breaks that way.
Or use an xml validator like http://www.w3schools.com/XML/xml_validator.asp

Also note that if you find the error and fix it, you must restart boxee for it to take effect, once it has failed to load the entire window.

Hope this helps,
Stefan

[xarragon]

Another thing top watch out for is the fact that Boxee seems to prefer to load the backup files that vim/gvim (my editor) is storing next to the regular XML files with a different file extension (main.xml~ in this case). So if you use vim you should probably disable the backup features or you'll have one hell of a problem to track down.

set nobackup
set nowritebackup
set noswapfile

The above commands disables the swapfile and backup files.

[claytron]

set nobackup
set nowritebackup
set noswapfile

The above commands disables the swapfile and backup files.

Instead of disabling those options you can set them to something saner like the following:

" hide the backup and swap files
set backupdir=~/.backup/vim,.,/tmp
set directory=~/.backup/vim/swap,.,/tmp
set backupskip=/tmp/*,/private/tmp/*,$TMPDIR/*,$TMP/*,$TEMP/*

Then you can just create a ~/.backup/vim directory. Then you won't have all those backup and swap files lying around in your code.

[xarragon]

Many thanks for the suggestion! It will be really helpful for my editing. I havn't explored even a fraction of all the available options in vim yet. In this case I just went for a simple solution that I knew would work. I already had backups via version control software, so..