Re: [OT] Guidelines for handling data in a GUI application?

[Jef Driesen <jefdriesen hotmail com>]

Murray Cumming wrote:
> On Fri, 2006-11-17 at 15:41 +0100, Jef Driesen wrote:
> > I'm ready to write my first real GUI application (using gtkmm of 
> > course). I studied the gtkmm documentation and can make simple 
> > applications. The focus there was on the user interface part (e.g. 
> > adding widgets, event handling and stuff like that). But that is only 
> > one part of an application. My application must also be able to show and 
> > modify data. But I don't know how to do that in a "well designed" way.
> >
> > I looked for more information, but I couldn't find what I'm looking for. 
> > I do find lots of information on GUI toolkits and database APIs, but 
> > almost nothing useful on how to glue them together. Does anyone know 
> > where I can find more information on this (websites, books,...)?
> >
> > To give you some more background on my project: My application stores 
> > its data in an sqlite database. The application will have one main 
> > window, probably some type of master-detail view, with a listview for a 
> > (readonly) overview of the main database table and a detail part to 
> > modify that data. All the other data in the database is related to that 
> > main table (e.g. data to populate widgets in the detail part of the main 
> > window) and modified using secondary windows.
>
> It's probably worth looking at libgnomedb.

I took a quick look at the libgnomedb website [1] and it seems to 
provide some wrapper around various database apis (including sqlite) and 
data-aware widgets. I'm not sure if that's what I'm looking for. Using 
the sqlite api directly seems also much easier and is very well documented.

My problem is not really that I don't how to get the data out of the 
sqlite database and add it to a certain widget. It's more about how do I 
structure/design my code. Things like: Do I add the database code inside 
my window classes? How do I pass data between windows? Do I create a 
class for every object stored in the database? At which point do I 
validate the user input? ...

If I could study a well written and not too large or complicated 
project, that would already help me a lot.

[1] http://www.gnome-db.org/