[Glade-users] Abusing Glade? :-)

[tristan.van.berkom at gmail.com (Tristan Van Berkom)]

On Mon, Nov 16, 2009 at 12:53 PM, Tim Cook <timothywayne.cook at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> For those that may have built their own widgets and added them to Glade
> I'd like to ask a question.
>
> I want to use the Glade machinery to allow users to build what I call
> constraint definitions against a well defined reference model. ?There
> will only be about 30 or so widgets and most of them are simply
> adaptations of existing widgets. ?Containers, trees, lists, text boxes,
> etc. but of course all the properties/constraints are different
> (actually simpler than in Glade).
>
> So I would like to hide/remove the existing Glade widgets and leave only
> my two libraries visible. ?Then in the XML I will write the names of the
> classes from the reference model as well as modify all the property
> settings according to each class as needed.
>
> So why do this? ?Well, it gives me a great starting point for people
> without knowledge of a complex system to be able to put components
> together in a way that makes sense to them in their domain. ?Gives me a
> generic XML output that I can use to build classes for a variety of
> programming languages that can be executed against this reference model
> in each of those languages.
>
> Here is a (non-sensical) modified XML file just showing how I envision
> the object (class) names being changed to match the reference model. ?I
> didn't bother with the property names but you can imaging that they will
> be modified extensively as well.
>
> I would appreciate any thoughts/commets/feedback on this approach.

Hi,
    First of all, everything you want to do should be quite simple and require
no modifications to Glade, except hiding the existing catalogs.

Glade installs usually with at least the GTK+ catalog - and while practically
speaking, you dont need to display this catalog in the palette, you do need
the GTK+ catalog to be installed to do useful things with GTK+ derived objects.

Basically, if you havent yet looked into the reference docs, the idea is that
every catalog provides an adaptor class for any object that the catalog wants
to introduce to the Glade runtime - so for instance, to leverage the code
that does Drag/Resize in the GtkTable widget, you will want to derive from
the GladeWidgetAdaptor that was subclassed for GtkTable.

So I would suggest you start by creating your catalog with your GTK+ derived
widgets and depend on the 'gtk+' catalog - when you are finished that part,
which may only imply declaring the object types and disableing/hiding some
properties, or could imply providing some of your own custom editing widgets
(i.e. the property editor is subclassable and allows you to present
the information
differently than just flat properties, the class adaptor provides a mechanism
to create an editor on behalf of the class)...

Anyway that would be the juice of your work, hiding the installed GTK+ catalog
from the palette could be a feature you maintain as a downstream hack/patch
against Glade, or if its of any real use to others we could even develop some
mechanism in Glade to hide widgets from catalog dependencies.

Actually, you could even probably just remove the
<glade-widget-class-ref> entries
and <glade-widget-group> entries in the GTK+ catalog, which would result in the
types getting properly introduced into the runtime, but no references
to the widgets
from the palette.

Have fun :)

Cheers,
        -Tristan