Re: [Pango] Calls to Pango::Layout without effect

["Matthias Kaeppler" <matthias finitestate org>]

Hi Bob, Hi Murray,

first of all, thanks for all your replies. Unfortunately I hadn't had the
opportunity to read this newsgroup until now since Friday, so here is what I
did meanwhile to get access to the embedded Gtk::Label in a
Gtk::MessageDialog:

1. Get a pointer to the dialog's main vbox
2. Get its children
3. Get a pointer to the reverse-begin (for some reason, the children seem to
be inserted in the container in reverse order; printing their names by
reverse-iterating over the container yielded an hbox at the reverse-first
position)
4. Downcast the widget at children.rbegin() to Gtk::HBox
5. Apply the same procedure to the Gtk::HBox, which consists of a Gtk:Image
and a Gtk::VBox holding the labels (it's two of them IIRC)
6. Get a pointer to the first label

After this procedure I was able to mess around with the MessageDialog's
"internals", but I took a huge step backwards, looked at my code and
recognized how ugly and more of a hack this actually was.

Therefore, I went back and derived my own dialog type from Gtk::Dialog,
which pretty much behaves like a MessageDialog, but now I have total control
over its behavior, layout and looks without exposing the internals of a
library component. In the end, this seemed to be the cleanest and best
approach to me.

Best regards,
Matthias Kaepper