I'm thinking about a new skin, and there are two questions I can't answer:

First, is it possible to nest conditions to get the equivalent of

IF x AND y THEN z
or
IF x OR y THEN z

I could probably get a similar effect by clever layering of items, but I'd love there to be an easier way.

Second, I'm wondering whether a skin can discover and use the total number of items in a menu, so you could show, for instance, the string 'There are 9 games in this list'?

Thanks for any advice.

Well, the first question will really be: Are you writing a script or skin? Because as of now, skins don't support scripting features.

As for nesting (it's not elegant, but it works)

IF x AND y THEN z

I think he's referring to the use of conditionals in skin elements.

All skin conditionals also have "not" equivalents; which ones are you looking to use, and for what effect?

Yes, I'm thinking of conditionals in skin elements. I'm muddling some ideas around in my head, and in this case what I wanted to be able to do was (uninteresting in itself) to pick out all the odd (and later all the even) numbered items in a short (root) menu, ie

IF this is the MainMenu AND ItemSelected is number 1 OR 3 OR 5 THEN show this element
otherwise
IF this is the MainMenu AND ItemSelected is number 2 OR 4 THEN show this element

I could do the numerical OR bit with a list of individual elements

<LayoutElement Type="Image" Source="Whatever">
<Condition Arg1="1">ItemSelected</Condition>
</LayoutElement>

<LayoutElement Type="Image" Source="Whatever">
<Condition Arg1="3">ItemSelected</Condition>
</LayoutElement>

and so on, but as far as I can see to do the AND starts to require clever element layering (a layer to hide all this stuff if it's NOT the MainMenu or something like that), so I wondered if there was an easier more general way available to skinners, that would make this kind of IF/THEN/AND/OR stuff easy:

<Condition>MainMenu</Condition> AND <Condition arg="1">ItemSelected</Condition> OR <Condition arg="3">ItemSelected</Condition>

or something...

For this trivial application it would also be interesting to be able count the number of items in a menu, although I'm racing on to something like 'for ItemSelected is ODD from 1 to Count of Menu items' which is unlikely to happen

I was just thinking last night what a great thing it is to have a community where you can toss out questions like this and know someone's going to try to help.

Thanks all.

Well, the conditionals are "AND" only, but through clever usage of the NOT, you could simulate the OR operation.