focal (3) Gtk2::Ex::FormFactory::Intro.3pm.gz
NAME
Gtk2::Ex::FormFactory::Intro - Introduction into the FormFactory framework
DESCRIPTION
The Gtk2::Ex::FormFactory framework is for Perl Gtk2 developers who (at least partially ;) agree with
these statements:
• GUI programming is fun but often boring
• A lot of tasks in GUI programming are similar and misleads the lazy programmer to do too much Copy'n
Paste
• RAD tools like Glade are fine for small applications but not if you want to have a consistent look and
feel in bigger and modular applications
Gtk2::Ex::FormFactory tries to help you with these issues by
• Strictly separating GUI design, application logic and data structures
• Giving the developer a more declarative style of defining the structure of your GUI
• Giving the developer the possibility of definiting the design of the GUI at a single spot in your
program
• Being lightweight and easy to learn.
Enough buzzwords
Imagine you want to build a configuration dialog for your application, which consists of a notebook, to
distinguish several topics, each containing a bunch of simpler widgets (in the following example a single
text entry). Also it should have the usual Ok and Cancel buttons.
The straight approach often is to code all the stuff by hand or "draw" all widgets using Glade. At any
rate you need to take care of:
• Consistent look and feel, e.g. labels should be bold and properly aligned to the widgets; the widgets
iteslf should have some space around them, buttons should always be aligned to the form above etc.
• Initializing the widgets with the actual content of your configuration data
• Either connecting a lot of signals to track the changes the user made. This would apply all changes
straight to your internal data structure, which may make implementing the Cancel button difficult or
impossible
• Or grabbing all (changed) data from the widgets, when the user hit the Ok button resp. simply close
the window, when the user hit the Cancel button
That's a lot of stuff, which needs to be repeated for every single dialog in your application. No fun
anymore.
Gtk2::Ex::FormFactory will do the boring stuff for you. That's how it works:
Register your objects to the Context
Create a Gtk2::Ex::FormFactory::Context object and register all your objects, which should be
presented/changed by the GUI, here:
my $context = Gtk2::Ex::FormFactory::Context->new;
$context->add_object (
name => "config",
object => $config_object
);
$config_object has at least the following methods in our example below:
- get_data_dir()
- get_selected_page()
- set_data_dir()
- set_selected_page()
The Context is a layer which encapsulates the methods of accessing your object's attributes. Also the
Context knows about relationships between objects and/or their attributes, so it's able to handle
correspondent updates on the GUI side automatically. We will discuss more details of
Gtk2::Ex::FormFactory::Context later in this document.
Define the structure of your GUI
Create Gtk2::Ex::FormFactory object and define the structure of your GUI. E.g, you want to have window
which contains a notebook, which consists of a few pages with a bunch of text entries in them. This will
look this way: [ very compressed and evil nesting for this document - for bigger dialogs you will break
this into several pieces ]
my $ff = Gtk2::Ex::FormFactory->new (
context => $context,
content => [
Gtk2::Ex::FormFactory::Window->new(
title => "Preferences",
content => [
Gtk2::Ex::FormFactory::Notebook->new (
attr => "config.selected_page",
content => [
Gtk2::Ex::FormFactory::VBox->new (
title => "Filesystem",
content => [
Gtk2::Ex::FormFactory::Form->new (
content => [
Gtk2::Ex::FormFactory::Entry->new (
attr => "config.data_dir",
label => "Data Directory",
tip => "This directory takes all your files.",
rules => "writable-directory",
),
],
),
],
),
],
);
Gtk2::Ex::FormFactory::DialogButtons->new
],
),
],
);
$ff->open; # actually build the GUI and open the window
$ff->update; # fill in the values from $config_object
So now you defined that you want to have a text entry, which contains a valid writable directory name,
which should be inside a form on a notebook page. No details about the exact layout yet, this is just the
strucure of your dialog
But how is this rendered?
For this task Gtk2::Ex::FormFactory creates a Gtk2::Ex::FormFactory::Layout object which takes care of
all the rendering details. Gtk2::Ex::FormFactory has a default implementation of this, but you can easily
inherit from this module to define your own layout (that's mainly for what all this is good for!) and
pass it to the FormFactory as the layouter.
The Layout module mainly consists of two types of methods
Methods for building a widget
build_TYPE() methods for each FormFactory widget type (Entry, SelectList, Popup, Foo etc.) you use in
your dialog. These have the Gtk2 code actually necessary to create the corresponding Gtk2 widgets.
Methods for adding a widget to a container
These are the so called add_WIDGET_to_CONTAINER() methods, which specify how a particular widget type
is added to a particular container type. E.g. they're responsible for consistent looking labels
beside widgets etc.
Because the details of adding a widget mainly depend on the container the widget is added to, there
are generic methods for adding arbitrary widgets to a container. If there is no specific method for a
widget type this generic method is called instead.
Layout methods for our example
The Layout implementation needs the following methods, to be able to generate a layout for our
FormFactory defined above:
build_window => creates a Gtk2::VBox in a Gtk2::Window
build_notebook => creates a Gtk2::Notebook
build_form => creates a Gtk2::Table (2 columns)
build_entry => creates a Gtk2::Entry
build_dialog_buttons => creates a ButtonBox with Ok/Apply/Cancel
add_widget_to_form => adds entry to table, label in 1st column
add_widget_to_notebook => adds form to notebook with tab title
add_widget_to_window => adds notebook and buttonbox to the window
If you regularly code applications with Gtk2 you know, that none of this tasks is rocket science. But you
have a lot of parameters for each widget in question to take care of (simply think of the border_width
property which may lead to an ugly misaligned mess, if you don't handle it really consistently)
Because you define this tasks at a single point in your program, it's really easy to create a
consistently looking application. Or to change the look quickly. E.g. you decide to put a frame around
all your forms? Just change one method - build_form() - and you're done!
Huh, a lot of new Widget classes to learn!
Not really. The FormFactory Widget classes are very simple and mainly wrap correspondent Gtk2 widgets, so
you don't need to learn much more.
Using the builtin widgets is really easy. They all ship with a manual page describing their specific
attributes, which usualy isn't much.
Also Gtk2::Ex::FormFactory has some nifty wrappers for really inconvenient Gtk2 widgets, like
Gtk2::Table. Take a look at Gtk2::Ex::FormFactory::Table to learn how easy programming complex table
layouts can be. Or look at Gtk2::Ex::FormFactory::Image which is a nice image widget which resizes the
image automatically in configurable ranges.
Building your own FormFactory widgets
If you need more widgets: implement them on your own. Gtk2::Ex::FormFactory widget classes don't have
much Gtk2 code in them, they just define the properties, which represent this particular form item and
implement mainly the following methods:
• Define a short name for the type (e.g. "entry" for a Gtk2::Entry - the Layout->add_X_to_Y() methods
are derived from the short name)
• Transfer the object's attribute value to the widget
• Transfer the widget's value to the object's attribute
• Connect the 'changed' signal for a synchronized dialog, e.g. if you want to react immedately on user
input
What the widget and object "value" actually is (a scalar, hash, array or complex structure) may be
arbitrarly defined. How object attributes are accessed, is defined in the Context module. Our example
uses the default set_foo(), get_foo() style accessors, but there are more methods up to defining
callbacks, which can do very complex lookups.
Data consistency
Now we know that the FormFactory suite solve layout issues very well. Another important feature is
automatic data consistency resp. keeping the GUI and your application data in sync.
Change an object attribute: the correspondent GUI widgets will update automatically. The user entered
data to a text entry: the object attribute associated with this entry will automatically get the new
text.
Gtk2::Ex::FormFactory must know your application's objects very well to do such a magic. That's what the
Gtk2::Ex::FormFactory::Context module is good for, mentioned shortly at the top of our example.
Abstraction from your application's objects
All your application objects are registered with a unique name to the Context module. Each FormFactory
has a reference to this Context, so it know the objects which are registered.
When you register your object to the Context, you may specify how attributes are accessed by setting
prefixes for read/write accessors.
You may even override methods inside the Context by specifying correspondent closures, which are called
instead of the original method.
Also objects in terms of the Context module may be abstract things like "The currently selected disc from
the currently selected artist", not only a simply hardwired object reference. This is done by calling a
closure returning the actual object instead of using a hardwired object.
This way dependend widgets update automaticly, as soon as the correspondent selection changes, e.g.
updating a list of CD titles when switching to another disc in an imaginary CD database program.
Widget consistency
Another challenge in a good GUI program is to make your widgets consistent in terms of graying out
widgets, which are not useful in a particular state of your program.
Gtk2::Ex::FormFactory manages visibility and sensivity of your widgets automatically for you once you
registered the correspondent dependencies at the Context. E.g. if there currently is no CD album
selected, the corresponding fields are greyed out automatically, including the field labels.
Data validity
Gtk2::Ex::FormFactory specifies Gtk2::Ex::FormFactory::Rules, which are checked against the values the
user entered. These conditions must apply, otherwise the old values are restored automatically. A bunch
of rules are shipped, but you can define your own set by specifying a correspondent rule object or
closures.
Extensibility
This framework was designed with extensibility in mind. You can
• Define your own FormFactory widgets, by simply using the base class Gtk2::Ex::FormFactory::Widget
resp. Gtk2::Ex::FormFactory::Container. No matter how complex your widget is as long as you provide
correspondent object attribute accessors, which transfer the widget's state to the object and vice
versa.
• Define your own FormFactory Layout module, by deriving from the default Layout implementation and
passing a correspondent object to the FormFactory constructor.
• All items in your FormFactory have a name, which will be set by default or to a value, you pass to the
item's constructor. This way your Layout implementation can even do very special things for very
special widgets, without the need of creating an extra Widget module for this.
• You can request any Gtk widget from a FormFactory widget by name to do further manipulation, although
you should consider doing this inside your Layout implementation, to keep the "single point of layout"
rule.
AUTHORS
Joern Reder <joern at zyn dot de>
COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE
Copyright 2004-2006 by Joern Reder.
This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU
Library General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2.1 of the
License, or (at your option) any later version.
This library is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even
the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Library General
Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU Library General Public License along with this library; if
not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307
USA.