[gtkmm] libglademm

[Christer Palm <palm nogui se>]

Hello everyone!

First of all, as a total newcomer to gtkmm, I'd like to introduce 
myself. I have earlier experience from GTK+ programming, and I'm a 
rather experienced C++ programmer, but it's not until now that I've 
actually taken the time to get all the bits and pieces together needed 
to get a gtkmm development environment up and running.

As my email address suggests, I don't do GUI programming professionally 
(actually I don't do much programming professionally at all nowadays) 
but rather I am tinkering around with open source stuff and personal toys.

Anyway, right now I'm playing around with a rather complex user 
interface and I thought I'd use gtmm together with libglademm for the job.

As always, there are some problems, so here we go;


1. Mapping the glade-generated widget hiearcy to my C++ code.

An old favorite I assume from searching through the archives of this and 
related lists (I can hear you all crying out in pain about going through 
this again).

I've taken the route of creating my own Gtk::Window objects with a 
constructor that looks up the guts of the corresponding window in the 
Glade::Xml and reparents it to itself. I also copy the basic attributes 
(such as title, etc) from the corresponding Glade::Xml window into my 
own window.

Now, is there a better way of doing this? Specifically;

  This works fine with a flat bunch of Windows, but what if I need a 
more complex hiearchy? Can/should I reparent at several points in the 
hiearchy?

  Currently, I copy the attributes from the Glade::Xml into my own 
object "manually" (i.e. attribute-by-attribute). Is there a way to make 
this simpler (i.e. like this->clone(xmlWindow);)?

  I'm a bit worried about reloading (i.e. calling Glade::Xml::create()) 
the XML everytime I create a window. The XML file is rather large. Is 
there some magic that avoids this internally, or should/can I re-use the 
Glade::Xml?

Unfortunately, the provided examples seems to more or less avoid these 
issues... :-(


2. Connecting signals

To connect a signal, I need about 5 lines of code for each signal (given 
that I want to avoid a segfault if the widget can't be located in the 
Glade::Xml). This is not _too_ bad, but mapping hundreds of signals 
still means a lot of code. I tried to cook up some shortcuts using 
templates which would allow me to do something like:

   connectActivate("my_widget", &MyWindow::onMyWidgetActivate);

but I wasn't able to come up with a completely elegant solution.
Any tips?


3. Mapping variables

Having tinkered with the signals, I moved along to look at how I would 
manage the widget values and found Glade::VariablesMap which provides 
exactly what I was looking for. Additionally, I would be able to use a 
similar mechanism for my signal connection shortcuts.

At least, so I though...

I got quite disappointed to find out that Glade::VariablesMap, by 
design, only works with entry boxes and checkbuttons (which is not 
mentioned anywhere, of course :-)). I suppose that there must have been 
plans on how to extend this to work in a generic way when this interface 
was added to libglademm. I can't figure out how it would work though...
Any ideas?

--
Christer Palm