Strategy for furute programs?

[John Coppens <john jcoppens com>]

Hello people.

Last week, I've been experimenting and learning about many of the newer
goodies in GTK, GtkBuilder, GConf and now I'm confused and looking for
advice.

Long time ago I wrote a program to manage my wife's pharmacy, and this
involves (among other things) several windows with many modifiable
widgets (checkbuttons, entries, spinbuttons, etc.) These have all to be
initialized before editing, and read back for saving.

Things as I understand them with GtkBuilder, I can't find addresses of
the widgets after I close GtkBuilder, so I have two options:

1) maintain a long list of widget references in my program to be able to
access them later, with the corresponding widget names to get them from
Builder in the first place.

2) Implement many callbacks to fill them in and read the changes (not
very practical).

Of course, in case of the program configuration I also have to maintain a
long list of GConf keys, type info, appart from the widget references and
names. More than 100 modifiable items in the config!

Is there some magical way to simplify this process? At least at first
sight, it seemed more simple in Glade-1/2, where I could simply
lookup_widget when I needed the widgets. Am I missing something here?

John