Re: property dialogs

[Marc Ewing <marc redhat com>]

Tom Tromey <tromey@creche.cygnus.com> writes:
> I've been considering writing a standard property dialog widget for
> Gnome.  It would basically be a tabbed notebook, but would be smart
> about enabling and disabling its buttons.  Right now there are at
> least 3 kinds of property dialogs in Gnome (the desktop-properties
> ones, the gtt one, and one other that I forgot).  They are all
> slightly different.

That would be great!  I was thinking about doing this myself now
that the help browser stuff has slowed down a bit (and after I
just went through the write-a-property-dialog routine for the
help browser :-).

My thoughts were to put something together that also integrated
gnome-config; something that would tie together:

1) a variable (reference) (with type and possible range restrictions)
2) a default value
3) a gnome-config string
4) a callback for change in value

One call to this module at program startup would handle the
initial gnome-config stuff and would not pop up the dialog
window.  Another call brings up the panel.  ...

> One question: should the "Apply" and "OK" buttons apply all the
> changes, or just the changes from the current page?  The desktop
> properties programs do the latter.  At first I thought this was a good
> idea, but now I'm concerned that it is potentially confusing.

I think all the changes.  If I make a bunch of edits on different
pages, I only want to press "OK" once.

-Marc