Re: bonobo-conf questions

[Dietmar Maurer <dietmar ximian com>]

Jeroen Zwartepoorte wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I've got some new questions after playing around with bonobo-conf. I'm
> hoping you can help me out.
>
> - It seems to take a while before ~/.gconf/test/example/%gconf.xml gets
> updated. The time i ran a new example (one that doesn't store it's
> values in ~/.gconf/test/example), only a directory was created. When the
> program closed, there wasn't any data in the %gconf.xml file. After a
> couple of minutes (or after running the program again) the file was
> finally > 0 bytes. Another example: i've changed the property type from
> long to boolean and ran the program again. It's now 10 min later, and i
> still don't see the change reflected in the %gconf.xml file. Do i need
> to close something in order to have the underlying GConf update the
> file?
>

You need to do a Bonobo_ConfigDatabase_sync(), which writes all unsaved
data immediately to disk.

> - What's the smart way to use bonobo-conf in an application? Initially,
> there are no values stored, so you'd want to set them to their default
> values, right? How do you check if there aren't any existing values?
>
>         if ((arg = Bonobo_Property_getValue (prop, &ev)) == NULL)???

No, instead check if you get a NotFound exception. Anyway, defaults should
be stored before you run the program (please take a look at the gconf
documentation, since we use gconf as database backend)

> - I've played with the example program that comes with bonobo-conf and
> i've changed it slightly so it uses bonobo-conf itself to generate the
> GUI. This GUI leaves a lot to be desired (ugly and unusable imo). I
> heard that's it's possible to have the BonoboControl itself return a
> GUI? Is this correct? If so, where do i need to look for this?

Take a look at bonobo-conf/examples/evolution-calendar-config.c, this is
the proposed way to generate nice dialogs.

> IMHO, i really think bonobo-conf really needs some additional/good
> examples if you want people to start using it.

First take a look at the existing examples, and then write some better
examples and more documentation :-) Maybe you can start to write a FAQ for
bonono-conf? I really need some help to do this.

- Dietmar