Function to find a spell on action bar

[Crabnab]

I'm currently working on an addon of my own and have run into a few snags, chief among them is the ability to determine which action bar slot a specified spell is in.

I'm curious if anybody has developed a function that when given a specific spell name, perhaps passed as an argument, if it can loop through the standard actionbar slots (1-72?) to determine which of those slots, if any, that spell is currently sitting in.

Ideally, I will use whatever this function returns and place it in:

ActionButton_ShowOverlayGlow($functionreturn)

Thanks in advance!

[Phanx]

LearningAid has a function to search for spells that are in your spellbook but not on any action button. Its code might be helpful.

[semlar]

I address this problem (more or less) in my addon Crack Cooldown by 1) attempting to identify every action button on the screen and 2) keeping a table of their current actions.

If you only want it to work for the default action buttons, then it's a simple matter of keeping a list of the bar names and then looping through the 12 action buttons on each bar and getting their current actions, then if the action is a spell you compare the name with the one you're looking for and if they match you call your glow function.

However, depending on what you're trying to do it might be possible to just hook an existing function that acts on a particular button and call your function on that same button.

Sorry, my addon is probably not a great example. Here's something to get you started..

local ActionBars = {'Action','MultiBarBottomLeft','MultiBarBottomRight','MultiBarRight','MultiBarLeft'}
function PrintActions()
    for _, barName in pairs(ActionBars) do
        for i = 1, 12 do
            local button = _G[barName .. 'Button' .. i]
            local slot = ActionButton_GetPagedID(button) or ActionButton_CalculateAction(button) or button:GetAttribute('action') or 0
            if HasAction(slot) then
                local actionName, _
                local actionType, id = GetActionInfo(slot)
                if actionType == 'macro' then _, _ , id = GetMacroSpell(id) end
                if actionType == 'item' then
                    actionName = GetItemInfo(id)
                elseif actionType == 'spell' or (actionType == 'macro' and id) then
                    actionName = GetSpellInfo(id)
                end
                if actionName then
                    print(button:GetName(), actionType, (GetSpellLink(id)), actionName)
                end
            end
        end
    end
end

I hope that's comprehensible.

[Phanx]

That should work, though for the OP's purpose you'd want to search the whole macro to see if the spell you were looking for was in there, instead of only checking its current action.

Also, I'd rewrite this part slightly:

if actionType == 'macro' then _, _ , id = GetMacroSpell(id) end
if actionType == 'item' then
    actionName = GetItemInfo(id)
elseif actionType == 'spell' or (actionType == 'macro' and id) then
    actionName = GetSpellInfo(id)
end

to something more like this:

if actionType == 'macro' then
    actionName, _ , id = GetMacroSpell(id)
    -- The first return value from GetMacroSpell is the spell name,
    -- so there's no need for an additional call to GetSpellInfo.
elseif actionType == 'item' then
    actionName = GetItemInfo(id)
elseif actionType == 'spell' then
    actionName = GetSpellInfo(id)
end

to avoid unnecessary checks and duplication.

Edit:
This variation of Semlar's code should do the trick for finding actions by name. It returns the button object, so you can then pass that to ActionButton_ShowOverlayGlow or whatever.

local ActionBars = { "Action", "MultiBarBottomLeft", "MultiBarBottomRight", "MultiBarRight", "MultiBarLeft" }

function MyAddon_FindActionByName(searchName)
	print("Searching action buttons for", searchName)
	for _, barName in pairs(ActionBars) do
		for i = 1, 12 do
			local buttonName = barName .. "Button" .. i
			local button = _G[buttonName]
			local slot = ActionButton_GetPagedID(button) or ActionButton_CalculateAction(button) or button:GetAttribute("action") or 0
			if HasAction(slot) then
				local actionType, id, _, actionName = GetActionInfo(slot)
				if actionType == "macro" then
					actionName, _, id = GetMacroSpell(id)
				elseif actionType == "item" then
					actionName = GetItemInfo(id)
				elseif actionType == "spell" then
					actionName = GetSpellInfo(id)
				end
				
				if actionName and string.match(string.lower(actionName), string.lower(searchName)) then
					print("Found", searchName, "as", actionType, actionName, "on", buttonName)
					return button
				end
			end
		end
	end
	print("Could not find", searchName, "on any action buttons")
end

[semlar]

The same spell can be on multiple buttons so I'm not sure if returning the first result is what they want.

I'm also not entirely sure they want to search through a macro for the text, they might just want to match it if it's the active spell.

[Phanx]

True. It might also be a good idea to make sure the button is visible before checking its action; it's unlikely (and probably undesirable) to have the same action on multiple buttons that are visible at the same time.

			local buttonName = barName .. "Button" .. i
			local button = _G[buttonName]
			if button:IsVisible() then
				...
			end

[Crabnab]

To all that have discussed/replied thus far- Thank you so much for your contribution. I will do a bit of development and debugging tonight and let you know how it goes. If I'm still having trouble, rather than theory craft, I'll post my source. Until then- again, thank you so much for your help!

I do have a few questions however- first of all, why is this loop done in pairs?

for _, barName in pairs(ActionBars) do

The variable above is set to single entries and you aren't doing anything with the first variable so far as I can tell- can you explain what's going on a bit more, please?

Additionally- can you please explain the semantic difference and need for needing to set a new variable to the same value as another variable but using the get global "_G"?

local button = _G[buttonName]

Thanks for the help!

[Phanx]

If you have a list-type table like { a, b, c } you can use ipairs to return the values in sequential order, eg. 1/a 2/b 3/c, or you can use pairs to return the values in undefined order, eg. 2/b, 1/a, 3/c. In either case, the key returned is the numeric index; in this case, we don't care about the order so we just use pairs, and we don't care about the index, so we just assign it to the underscore, which is commonly used to indicate a "junk" variable whose value is irrelevant.

We then take the value, assign it to the variable barName, and use it to construct the name of an action button. For example, when barName is "MultiBarLeft", on the 7th iteration of the inner loop, we would construct the button name "MultiBarLeftButton7".

for _, barName in pairs(ActionBars) do
	for i = 1, 12 do
		local buttonName = barName .. "Button" .. i

At this point, we have a string value. In order to get a reference to the actual button object whose global name matches that string value, we need to look up the string as a key in the global environment:

local button = _G[buttonName]

You could just do that in one line:

local button = _G[barName .. "Button" .. i]

...except that you use the button name again later as a string, so it's far more efficient to keep the string and object reference in separate variables and reuse the string variable, than to add a call to button:GetName() like Semlar's original code.