We've been seeing a lot of widgets coming into the Vodafone 360 Shop app review queue recently that have incorrect config.xml files. Some of the widgets work OK (some of the time), but many do not. Here are some quick tips for avoiding issues now and in the future:
Tip 1
To create a valid config.xml that will work across all of our 50 widget-enabled phones, use the Vodafone Widget Packager GUI (available for Windows, Mac and Linux). If you prefer to do this by hand, follow our tutorial or refer to section two of the Compatibility Notes document
Here's a very simple example:
<widget><widgetname>My Widget</widgetname><description>An example widget</description><width>200</width><height>200</height><author><name>MyName</name></author><icon>icon.png</icon></widget>You can use the JIL 1.0 config.xml format if you're specifically targeting the Vodafone 360 H1 and M1 phones, however there are some issues with the run-time implementation and this format will never be widely adopted. Besides, you're building widgets that scale well across multiple operating systems, screen sizes and input methods anyway, right?
Tip 2
Remember to declare any remote domains that your widget needs to pull data from. The correct format is:
<widget>
...<security><access><protocol>http</protocol><host>www.mydomain.com</host><port>80</port><path>/mywidget</path></access></security>
...</widget>Tip 3
You do not need to declare an ID, version number or update URL. We create unique values for your widget after you upload to the Vodafone Widgets Developer Platform, then insert these values into your config.xml before distributing to customers.
Tip 4
Do not declare a namespace in your config.xml. It's not required and will cause backward compatibility issues in the future.