[Glade-users] Large Glade XML vs Multiple Small Glade XML

[proglottis at nothing.co.nz (James)]

On Sun, 2008-10-26 at 03:01 -0400, Tristan Van Berkom wrote: 
> Im not exactly sure how gtkbuilder works in that respect, Im sure
though
> that for you builder using dialog class, it wouldnt be hard to install
the
> builder as class-wide data...
>
> Ive heard of people using your dialog approach before, sounds sane
> enough to me... as for saving in multiple or the same file, it
shouldnt
> make much difference, you can always split them using copy/paste
> across projects in glade in the future, and now glade trunk allows
> you to choose a naming scheme to let you have names unique by
> toplevel instead of project wide...
>
> ... although I should say, recent tests show that with really huge
> interfaces glade can be slow at load time (about a minute to load
> a glade file of ~1600 widgets) ... I still have to get around to
writing
> a progress bar for that ;-)

Sorry didn't CC the mailing list...

Oh yeah having a common builder would be pretty good. The problem I have
is that once you have used the dialog from builder you end up soiling
the builders copy for future use. My technique has always just been to
(perhaps foolishly) create a new builder to fetch a fresh version of the
dialog.

Maybe a better technique would be to copy the dialogs from the builder,
hence keeping the builder pristine. Looking at the attribute listing of
the generated dialogs (I'm using python by the way) it has copy as used
by the python module `copy', but I cannot get this working. I imagine
gobject must have its own copy system, perhaps I should search the C
API. This is kind of moving into GTK issues of dialog/widget management.

This might be a good topic for a wiki or tutorial, "Glade 3 and multiple
dialogs" or "GTK Builder and multiple dialogs". Since the examples I've
found
(http://www.micahcarrick.com/12-24-2007/gtk-glade-tutorial-part-1.html)
only cover storing single dialogs in glade, then rely on generating
prefab dialogs on the fly. Which really only covers the most basic
applications.
---
James