Non-UI events?

[Mike Nielsen <miken bigpond net au>]

Dear list members,

I'm slowly getting the hang of using gtk+ with perl and glade (glade2perl), and am trying to build a well-constructed app (as opposed to the 'learning opportunities' I've created before).

In my app, I connect to a database, after which I'd like a set of widgets to automagically become sensitive. Likewise, on disconnection, the widgets need to become insensitive (unsensitive?).  It seems that there should be a way to have all the widgets that need to do something on a change of state at the application level register to receive a signal of some sort, so I don't have to go around un/setting them to sensitive and getting the list right each time.

Is there a canonical or generally accepted way of doing this?  Sorry if I've missed something that is blindingly obvious, but it seems I need to create a new signal -- is this right?

Thanks so much.

Regards,

Mike