Re: [gtk-list] Dynamic Menu Help

[Raph Levien <raph acm org>]

On Tue, 9 Dec 1997, Thomas S. Urban wrote:

> Hi
> 
> I am writing an app that will have multiple top level windows
> each with it's own menus.  Some of these menus I will want to
> change during the execution of the program.  The examples
> I have seen (including the gimp) seem to have static menus -
> correct me if I am wrong here.  After browsing the
> gtkmenufactory header file, I notice a couple of functions
> that might allow me to add and subtract items from the
> menu:
> 
> gtk_menu_factory_remove_paths (no ..._add_paths function)
> gtk_menu_factory_remove_entries
> gtk_menu_factory_add_entries
> 
> I was wondering if anyone had any experience in this that
> they could share.  Do these functions do what I suspect
> they do?  If not, should the whole menu_items array
> be overwritten, the old menu destroyed, and the new
> menu created with the factory everytime I wish to modify
> the window structure?

I think these functions will work. One that doesn't yet is 
gtk_menu_factory_remove_subfactory.

Deleting the whole menu and starting from scratch many be expensive, 
especially if the menu is actually visible at the time of the change.

I ended up using menus directly in Gzilla, rather than using the menu
factory. One problem with menu factories is that individual menu labels
cannot contain the '/' character. I also needed to deal with dynamically
creating new windows, each with its own menu. I found that menus are not
actually difficult to program. The main thing I gave up is the .menurc 
capability. If I found I needed that, I'd probably add capabilities to 
menufactory to escape the '/' character when needed. (now that I've got 
commit privileges in Gtk, I needn't be so careful to always do things in 
a way that doesn't affect Gtk itself)

> Is it better to use multiple menu_item arrays such as
> window1_menu_item[], window2_menu_items, etc. rather than
> one large array like the gimp does?

Back when Gzilla was still using menufactory, it used both - a big array 
for the static menus, and an array of size 1 for dynamically adding new 
menu entries.

Best of luck!

Raph