[Glade-devel] Extension of a glade plugin & inner workings of glade

[philippe.bertin at telenet.be (Philippe Bertin)]

Hello, all,

I' ve tried to find my way through glade documentation, and I have a 
hard time. My goal, in the end, is to create a new glade plugin myself, 
something similar to a file dialog (i.e. a combinatin of several 
internal widgets). Seeing the archives, I don't think I am the only one 
having problems understanding the way the information flows between the 
xml file parsing and the final program with all signals being connected 
to their handlers. The documentation now is more like an API description 
without any concepts behind it being explained, as well for glade as 
well as for libglade. Not easy when one's new to even GTK (apart from a 
couple of minor experiments in the past)

Let me therefor do an exercise. And elaborate my findings in a document 
that I'll put available thereafter. That way, (I and) future 'basic' 
users will have a better insight on to start with glade (and it's plugin 
system); and people will have an example to refer to, something that's 
badly missing currently to my feeling... This is all in the 
understanding that there is no such document available yet. If there is 
such a document available, then it's worthwhile adding a link to that 
document from within the currently existing glade documentation ...

A couple of first questions :

1. In the properties window, in the tab 'Common', I see a property 
called 'application paintable'. Grepping into the xml file and the code, 
I see nowhere where that property's properties are fetched by glade. How 
come ? Where am I missing a link ?

2. At glade execution time, what makes a toplevel widget really a 
toplevel widget ? That is, why does one get a composable window when 
clicking one of the toplevel buttons, but not when pressing the others ? 
Is this distinction to be found in the xml file ? It's for sure not 
solely (if at all) because they're part of a tag <glade-widget-group> ?

Should I rather ask such questions to glade-users ? I think glade users 
are mostly all developers ?

Kind regards,

PhB