[Glade-users] Generating classes, but no instantiation in glade--

[ansel babylon dyndns org (Ansel Sermersheim)]

I've been getting up to speed on glade and glade-- by playing around
with writing a utility to enumerate the USB bus and display it
spiffily.  (I had some old C++ code sitting around that parses
/proc/bus/usb/devices under Linux).

I've run into a bit of a design difficulty.  I have a paned window.
On the left is a DeviceTree (derived from Tree), displaying the
current USB topology.  (same as e.g. windows device manager).  This is
easy - I had glade-- generate it as a seperate class, and wrote some
bridge code in the initialisation to populate it.

On the right, I have a DeviceFrame (derived from Frame), with Labels
inside it displaying data about the currently selected device.  Now it
gets tricky.  A single device may have one or more Configurations,
each of which has one or more Endpoints.  So, if I click on a simple
device, say, a mouse, I should see something like this:

+-USB Mouse------------+
| Vendor ID: xxxx      |
| Product ID: xxxx     |
| ...                  |
|                      |
| +-Config 1---------+ |
| | Power=11mA       | |
| |                  | |
| |+-Endpoint 1-----+| |
| || Type: xxxx     || |
| |+----------------+| |
| +------------------+ |
+----------------------+

Whereas, if I click on something like a USB Camera, I want something
more like this:

+-USB Camera-----------+
| Vendor ID: xxxx      |
| Product ID: xxxx     |
| ...                  |
|                      |
| +-Config 1---------+ |
| | Power=55mA       | |
| |                  | |
| |+-Endpoint 1-----+| |
| || Type: xxxx     || |
| |+----------------+| |
| |+-Endpoint 2-----+| |
| || Type: xxxx     || |
| |+----------------+| |
| +------------------+ |
| +-Config 2---------+ |
| | Power=15mA       | |
| |                  | |
| |+-Endpoint 1-----+| |
| || Type: xxxx     || |
| |+----------------+| |
| +------------------+ |
+----------------------+

A sensible way of doing this seems to be to create each level of
frames as a seperate class.  Give DeviceFrame a vector<ConfigFrame *>,
and ConfigFrame a vector<EndpointFrame *>, and have them dynamically
populate/prune these lists when a device is selected. (Obviously, each 
of them will get an hbox as well to which the children will be added.)

(If there's a simpler, cleaner, more sensible way to do this, please
let me know.)

However, this doesn't work.  No matter what I try, I can't get glade-- 
to _not_ generate code that does e.g.

ConfigFrame * configframe;
configframe = manage(new ConfigFrame);
configframe->show();

in DeviceFrame_glade.cc thus leaving me with an undesired child that I 
then have to destroy if I want to be able to add my own widgets in the 
space.

I'm looking for a way to say 'Generate the class for this widget, but
do _not_ instantiate or reference it from the parent widget, because
I'll do it at runtime from derived-class code.'

The only way I can get this to stop is if I create a new top-level
window, and put the ConfigFrame in it.  Then since it is no longer a
child of the DeviceFrame, the DeviceFrame will not attempt to
instantiate one.  However, this is kind of clunky from a GUI design
standpoint.  

This leads to two top-level windows that are never used, because they
only serve to give me somewhere other than the current window in which
to put a child window I want to generate classes for.  In this project
it's not too bad, because I've just got one main window & an about
box, but in a larger application it could get very confusing.

If I were to try to add this to glade, where do I start looking?  I
assume I'll have to add support for generating the option tag in glade 
proper, and have glade-- look for that tag and avoid generating the
corresponding code.  If someone could point me to the relevant bits of 
code, I'd be most obliged.

Thanks,
-Ansel
--
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