Re: [gtk-list] Re: best widget for a spreadsheet

[Donald R Willhoit <willhoit+ andrew cmu edu>]

Excerpts from mail: 10-Oct-97 [gtk-list] Re: best widget .. by Ivo
Clarysse@riv.be 
> Also, I'd like an ability for 'sparse' data structures (for example, the
> cell contents may come out of an SQL database and not fit in virtual
> memory all at once).

I was thinking that the "revised table", now probably better known as
sometype of Grid would contain arbitrary child widgets, thus letting you
do just that by writing a widget the displays the result of a SQL query.
 

For large tables this may be hideously inefficient.  Perhaps I could
also write a widget that only displays say strings.  Call this a
SimpleGrid, then you could have a a structure that holds a pointer to
the text if any, and what would basically happen is you would pass a
pointer to a function that takes a pointer to one of these structures,
and a pair of integers specifying table location and that function would
return via the structure what belongs in that cell.

Now that I think about it this model should apply to the one that holds
arbitary widgets too...

How about:
WidgetGrid
SimpleGrid

And if you pass a NULL pointer for the function to the grid it can
manage itself.  So the function would have to be able to "add"  data
too.  I guess if you pass it a pointer to a structure with non-null
pointers in it then it should be interpretted as set x,y to this value.

Ryan