Composite saga continues

So I took another Saturday afternoon to look after the whole composite thing I started hacking on last week. It’s surprisingly not a lot of work to do in terms of lines of code written.

First, I went and enhanced GtkBuilder so that you can add a parent widget context to the parse; this way while parsing GtkBuilder fragments you can start them with the <child> tag instead of <object> and have the builder parent the serialized children onto a dynamic runtime instance (in our case, a composite container widget).

Second, I trashed gtkcomposite.[ch] and integrated the code into GtkContainer (following Rafael Villar Burke’s advice); this way any already existing container widget can be extended as a composite widget.

Third thing was, as Torsten Schoenfeld pointed out was missing, I added api for bindings to assign a GtkBuilderConnectFunc to be used on a per class basis, this means that for instance, composite widget code in GTK+ gets connected with regular C callbacks, but derived code of that same widget in another language gets to use a connection algorithm specific for that class vtable for that language… which brings me to..

Finally composite classes can also be extended and each class can optionally pull in a .ui template to define its children, which means with some added magic of gtk_container_get_composite_child() to pull out implicitly defined composite children, GtkBuilder has no problem to “blend in” widgets added from subclasses into internal composite containers exposed from a composite parent (I added a new test case to the bug describing this).

For those who are wondering what the hell kinda crack this guy is cookn’ up, basically… its an api of GtkContainer that lets you associate a GtkBuilder .ui file with any container class you define, automatically assigning any property endpoints you define to the corresponding instances built from the GtkBuilder fragment – at construct time, for free – an effort to completely abstract the packing of widgets from user code, and hide GtkBuilder semantics under the hood.

Thats it for me today… I hope you’re excited !