Re: storing Perl-Gtk objects on disk

[Count Zero <countzero cyberdeck org>]

Cogan, Gil was overheard mumbling something about this on Wed, 13 Sep 2000
06:41:46 -0700

> Hi,
>  
>  I've built a Gtk Tree widget, and I tried to save it on disk using
>  Data::Dumper and Storable, but it seems that 
>  it doesn't work fine - the file to which I dumped the Tree (using
>  Data::Dumper) had only the following contents:
>  
>   $VAR1 = bless( {
>                '_gtk' => 139736072
>              }, 'Gtk::TreeItem' );
>  
>  it seems that all of the widget's arguments were lost.
>  
>  Is it possible to store GUI objects on disk? Should it differ from storing
>  'regular' objects?

Yes... 

Gtk+ objects are in C... perl doesn't know anything about them really.  The
"object" methods you call in perl are simply wrappers around the C function
calls.  Besides, what are you really trying to do?  If you simply want to
create a GUI that you can load and save to disk, try looking into libglade...

When you do something like $ctree->set_column_width(0,130) or whatever, really
you are just telling perl to call the gtk_ctree_set_column_width() C
function... Most of Gtk+ objects attributes are private anyway... you use
functions to get and set the attributes of most things (there are a few
exceptions.. but not many)  You are confusing "objects" with "structures" I am
thinking... When you access a Gtk+ widget via the $widget->something() syntax,
->something() is a function, not a value... its not like an anonymous hash that
you can get at via Data::Dumper... syntax is similar, but they are two
completely different things

Otherwise, you would do something like $ctree->{column}[0]->{width} = 130; to
set the width of column 0... that would be accessing the ctree as though it
where a structure... it's not though, so that doesn't work!

-CZ