SDK Show info from an API call in the sectionsForTopOfDialog

[LightroomStatistics]

In the plugin manager I want to show information retrieved via an API.

I get the error "We can only wait from within a task".

Normally for the "normal" plug-in functionality I start the main function from within

	LrFunctionContext.postAsyncTaskWithContext ("Photo settings", function( context )
			LrDialogs.attachErrorDialogToFunctionContext( context )
			main()
		end)

but how can I get the info from the internet API in the plug-in manager.

local LrHttp = import "LrHttp"

local JSON = require 'JSON'

local function getIpAddress()
	local headers = 	{
		{ field = "Accept", value = "application/json" },
		{ field = "Content-Type", value = "application/json" },
		{ field = "User-Agent", value = "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/64.0.3282.140 Safari/537.36 Edge/17.17134" },
		{ field = "X-Requested-With", value = "XMLHttpRequest" },
	}

	local responseBody, hdrs = LrHttp.get("https://ipinfo.io/161.185.160.93/geo", headers )
	local responseTable = JSON:decode(responseBody)

	return responseTable.ip
end

local function sectionsForTopOfDialog( f, _ )
	local ipAddress = getIpAddress()

	return {
		-- Section for the top of the dialog.

		{
			title = LOC "$$$/CustomMetadata/PluginManager=Custom Metadata Sample",
			f:row {
				f:static_text {
					title = "IP address",
				},
				f:static_text {
					title = ipAddress,
					fill_horizontal = 1,
				},
			},
		},

	}
end

return{

	sectionsForTopOfDialog = sectionsForTopOfDialog,

}

[johnrellis · Accepted solution]

A workaround in these situations is to fetch the desired value in a separate task and update the UI when the value arrives:

local function sectionsForTopOfDialog (f, prop)
    prop.ipAddress = "<fetching IP address>"
    LrTask.startAsyncTask (function ()
        prop.ipAddress = getIpAddress ()
        end)

    ...f:static_text {title = LrView.bind "ipAddress"}...

The user will see "<fetching IP address>" initially, which then gets replaced with the actual IP address when it arrives.

[LightroomStatistics]

This works, thanks again