Re: Trying to get custom Bonobo tool bar controls & standard buttons to match appearance

[Michael Meeks <michael helixcode com>]

Hi John,

On Wed, 6 Dec 2000, John Sullivan wrote:
> In the Nautilus tool bar are Back and Forward buttons. These buttons    
> are intended to look and act exactly like other tool bar buttons, with  
> one difference: right-clicking on them gives a pop-up menu.
  
        Yes.

> I could find no way to get access to the right-click event with a 
> normal Bonobo tool bar item

        There is no way to do this.    

> so I made a control and embedded within it my own widget. I made my
> widget be a BonoboUIToolbarButtonItem, so that I could share as much
> code as possible with standard Bonobo tool bar items, and thus
> minimize differences.

        This is the correct approach.

> This works pretty well, but one place where it fails is in the
> BonoboUIToolbarItemStyle. My widget doesn't have this style set when    
> the standard tool bar buttons do, and I haven't found any way for my   
> widget to determine what style is used by standard tool bar buttons.  
> And when the style changes (e.g. when a dragged-off tool bar is made  
> vertical), my widget doesn't react.
  
        Yes; ok, the right solution to this I think is to define several  
properties that we can use to signal style changes to embedded
controls. This is my preferred method, to improve the platform.           
              
> Perhaps there's already the right mechanism in here for me to hook 
> into, but I just didn't notice it? Or is this a known design problem
> in Bonobo, where controls don't get notified/updated the way standard  
> tool bar buttons do?
 
        Yes; it is a known issue, can you add the 'bonobo:look' and other
properties as neccessary. I think we should probably namespace the
properties at least like above; similar to the oaf attribute namespaceing 
- rather feeble really.                        
  
> Unless there's a way to do this that I didn't realize, my plan is to
> duplicate enough logic to get the initial style right, and punt on the 
> fact that style changes in the lifetime of the tool bar won't affect   
> my widget.
  
        Better to do it with properties I think, see
bonobo-property-bag[-client].[ch], it should be easy, less work, more
robust and a useful solution to others I think; sound good ? :-)
  
        Regards,

                Michael.

-- 
 mmeeks gnu org  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot