[Glade-devel] [Glade-users] Using Treeviews

[murrayc at murrayc.com (Murray Cumming)]

On Thu, 2006-12-21 at 13:32 -0500, Tristan Van Berkom wrote:
> Treeviews are designed for optimization, you can display a
> dataset of 100,000 rows in a treeview and you'll only render
> the visible rows - this is the excelent value of the GtkTreeView.
>
> Over time, treeviews have been abused, people use treeviews
> to display a static list of choices for example - a job much
> better suited for some simple canvas implementation, a dropdown
> menu, combo box or such - why do I call this abuse ? because
> it shouldnt take someone the effort of writing an entire treeview
> code just to display a couple of options.

TreeModels are not just used by TreeViews. GtkComboBox and GtkIconView
use too them too, for instance.

> So, in the terms of what I think are valid use cases of a treeview,
> where a treeview is not overkill for the task at hand, the model 
> data is invariably dynamic, nothing that could be defined in a
> GUI designer.

It's a difficult problem, yes.

> So I would opt to sooner add support for canvases etc in glade
> for those cases where people need simple hardcoded lists/choices,
> and leave dynamic model data to the programmer to generate.
>
> Maybe thats a drastic opinion ;-)

-- 
Murray Cumming
murrayc at murrayc.com
www.murrayc.com
www.openismus.com