GtkComboBox with a tree view

[Sébastien Granjoux <seb sfo free fr>]

Hi all,


I have several use cases where I need to select one item in a big tree 
view, typically as a parent for creating a new node.

I'm using a GtkTreeView but I think it takes too much space while I 
already have the right parent in most of the cases. In some dialogs, I 
have used an expander to hide the tree view but I think using a 
GtkComboBox will be better.

However there are two issues with the GtkComboBox. First, setting it to 
use a tree view instead of menus is not really straight forward. Then 
except with quite small tree, the creation of the widget takes so much 
time that it's unusable.


Could I rely on the fact that the GtkComboBox will display the items as 
a tree view? I means is it a bug if a theme doesn't do it correctly or 
it is rather just an hint. Does it makes sense to add a function to 
easily set this?

Is it useful that I spend time on GtkComboBox code trying to make it 
faster? As the GtkTreeView is much faster, I suppose we can reach the 
same performance with the GtkComboBox. Or do we consider that the 
GtkComboBox is designed to handle only a small number of items? As the 
list contains a lots of items, it will make sense to have the 
interactive search entry of the GtkTreeView too.

Or is the right solution is to use a GtkButton displaying a real 
GtkTreeView instead of using a GtkComboBox?


Regards,

Sébastien