Re: gtk custom widgets

[Daniel Piccoli <d piccoli murdoch edu au>]

Thanks Guys,

the main reason I'm creating a new widget is to enable me to store a
struct that contains info about a sound file that is displayed by this
widget. I don't see any other way to do it. If I don't create a
composite widget, this struct data will be lost once the signal handler
function which creates it completes.

Does this sound reasonable?

On Wed, 2004-10-20 at 18:22, Maciej Katafiasz wrote:
> Dnia 20-10-2004, śro o godzinie 16:35 +0800, Daniel Piccoli napisał:
> > I was just reading the gtk tutorial and it says to only write a new
> > widget if there isn't one available that performs your required task.
> >
> > I have found that I have to create a new widget to enable me to store
> > additional data that may effect the display of a widget. eg. I store
> > information about the audio samples to be displayed by a graphing widget
> > (that already exists). 
> >
> > This is in a similar fashion to creating a big app class in Java (swing)
> > and making this class consist of a composition of widgets that already
> > exist as well as data objects that are needed for your application.
>
> Yes. There's a difference between writing totally new widget from
> scratch, which is not encouraged unless there isn't anything that can be
> used instead, and creating your own composite widgets, which is very
> common, and good, practice. Each time you have similar setup done in
> more than one place, or if it's complicated, it's good idea to create
> composite widget for that and use it wherever you'd use hand-written
> setup code. Take a look at any non-trivial GNOME app, like gconf-editor,
> gedit, etc. Each one has bunch of custom composite widgets used all over
> the place for search dialogs and similar stuff
>
> HTH,
> Maciej