Controlling Click Propagation / Interaction Start Tracking

Audio Plugins
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Hey everyone! After many years of wrangling lifecycle events between plugin wrappers, formats, and DAW quirks, a couple months ago I decided to rewrite my application lifecycles to only begin certain services and tasks when a user actually clicks or begins interacting with my UI.

I thought this would be easy – however upon some review, there appears to be no way inside of JUCE to hook into a click event before it processed by the original child components. Desktop click listening also fire after the components internal click handling. This means there’s no way inside of JUCE to “design” the order of click propagation.

Seems this is a niche feature but with some DAWs constructing plugin UIs and keeping them hidden, it seems more and more desirable to have some sort of “plugin interaction began” hook for any plugin which has complex orchestration. It can be a real waste of resources without being able to track this.

Does anyone have a good solution here? I’ve debating adding some sort of transparent top level component over the entire product UI but I’m not actually sure if this would work in practice.

Thanks!

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Wouldn’t a global mouse listener and listening to mouseEnter events do the trick?

Yes, that’s a pity. I think it would be very useful in general.

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I think mouse move would work.

In the end I’ve changed over to lazy evaluation so when the service is called the first time it prepares itself if it’s not yet prepared.

I still think having some sort of way to detect engagement outside of the editor being constructed would be useful, but after trying a lot of solution this one produced the least amount of infrastructural management / cognitive overhead