Porting widgets to the new template API… the LAZY way!

First of all I want to thanks everyone involved in GUADEC organization specially to the GNOME foundation for sponsoring me once again.

It is been great meeting with old friends and making new ones!

So after Tristan’s talk UI developer experience with Glade/GtkBuilder where he talked about the new template API some good friend of us, lets see if you can guess who, came and ask:

So we talked about it and told him if that he was that lazy not to redo all widgets in glade manually he could do some function that iterate over containers and spit some xml to get at least the hierarchy right.

As we all know the lazier a programmer is the better, since it will end up writing a program to do its chores!

Anyways I did!

I made a function you can paste in your program and use it together with libgladeui api to dump a runtime GtkWidget to an xml definition.

#include <gladeui/glade.h>

/* Create a Glade project */
GladeProject *project = glade_project_new ();

/* add as many widgets as you want in the project */
glade_project_add_widget_from_object (project, widget, NULL);

/* And then save it to a file */
glade_project_save (project, "myclass.ui", NULL);

And that is all you have to do if the widget is simple enough.
You will have to mark internal children manually since there is no easy way to introspect them, say for example you want to dump a GtkDialog derived widget…

#include <gladeui/glade.h>

/* Create a Glade project */
GladeProject *project = glade_project_new ();

/* We need to mark every internal children manually */
INTERNAL_CHILD (gtk_dialog_get_action_area (GTK_DIALOG (widget)),
                "action_area");
INTERNAL_CHILD (gtk_dialog_get_content_area (GTK_DIALOG (widget)),
                "vbox");

/* add as many widgets as you want in the project */
glade_project_add_widget_from_object (project, widget, NULL);

/* And then save it to a file */
glade_project_save (project, "myclass.ui", NULL);

Here is the cut&paste code glade_dump.c

This is obviously hacky code, it was not heavily tested and will probably make gladeui and gtk API complain a lot but it works pretty well for what is intended.

BTW you have to link with gladeui-2.0 library for this code to work!

I think that is all, happy porting!