[Glade-users] Lightweight way for Glade to support custom widgets in a project?

[Juan Pablo Ugarte]

New version of glade wont delete unknown widgets, besides you cant open
a file that requires a missing catalog.

Take a look at
http://developer.gnome.org/gladeui/3.6/catalogintro.html

And if you really dont want to use your library at runtime
take a look at the parent property of glade-widget-class

http://developer.gnome.org/gladeui/3.6/widgetclasses.html


greets

JP

On Tue, 2012-02-28 at 17:35 -0800, Brian Marshall wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm trying to get Glade to work with a custom widget that I'm using.
> It's a very minor extension to GtkEntry, with a couple extra
> properties and methods defined. It works fine already if I add it at
> runtime with code. It also works fine if I manually edit the Glade .ui
> file and change class="GtkEntry" to class="MyWidget" - GtkBuilder
> finds the widget class in my Python code and adds it to the window.
> 
> The problem is that if I open the .ui file in Glade after this, it
> just deletes the custom widget. I've read that I need to add a catalog
> file to get Glade to recognize the widget, but that seems like
> overkill, and has a flaw: if someone (or me, on another computer)
> opens the project in Glade, and doesn't have the catalog file
> installed, then Glade will silently delete the widget from the window.
> 
> Is there some way to provide support for a custom widget in the .ui
> file itself? It doesn't have to be extensive support, but it would be
> nice if I could get Glade to keep the widget when it loads the file.
> Even a simple alias from MyWidget to GtkEntry would work. Something
> like:
> 
> <alias from="MyWidget" to="GtkEntry"/>
> <interface>
> ...
> </interface>
> 
> (Probably not the best solution, but just to get my idea across.) That
> would be enough to get Glade to display it and allow manipulation,
> with the actual custom parts done at program runtime, since GtkBuilder
> handles it from there.
> 
> Basically I'm looking for a way to move and place the widget in Glade,
> in a way that is embedded in the project, so that the failure case of
> silently deleting the widget on project load can never happen.
> 
> My current solution is to add the custom widget completely from code -
> Glade never sees it. Another solution is to put GtkEntry placeholders
> in Glade, and replace them at runtime, but that has more overhead (in
> terms of amount of code that I need to write, at least), since as far
> as I know replacing something in GTK requires removing it and adding a
> new element in the same place.
> 
> Also I want to clarify that if I take Glade out of the equation, and
> edit the .ui file manually and load it with GtkBuilder, then
> everything works. The only issue is that Glade doesn't recognize the
> widget when I'm editing the project.
> 
> Thanks in advance for any responses, I appreciate your time.
> 
> -- Brian
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