[Glade-users] Partial interfaces - no top level?

[tristan.van.berkom at gmail.com (Tristan Van Berkom)]

On Tue, Apr 7, 2009 at 2:02 PM, Matt Savigear <mcs_glade at savigear.com> wrote:
> Hi list,
>
> Sorry if this is an elementary question, but thus far I haven't managed
> to find anything via Google: Is it possible to define a partial
> interface in glade? In other words, one which does not have a top level
> object.
>
> I'd like to build an application which dynamically loads chunks of
> functionality which may be unknown at design time (i.e. plug-ins). I'd
> like to be able to pass the plug-in a reference to a container widget
> (supplied by the main application UI, maybe a notebook page) and
> effectively have it assign its own partial user interface this widget as
> a container.
>
> It looks like the only way to achieve this is for the plug-ins to define
> their UI programatically. I can't just seem to create, say, a frame as
> the highest-level widget and build my UI in this. Of course, I may also
> be thinking/going about this in completely the wrong way.
>
> If it makes any difference, I will be using ruby for the development.

It should make no difference, make sure you have Glade 3.6.x
and that you are using GtkBuilder.

In Glade, just right click on the palette item to create a toplevel
non-window object in the project (or alternatively right click in the
inspector with the palette item selected).

Note that if your objects have references to objects outside
the hierarchy such as actions or liststores etc, you will
need to know which ones to load from the Glade file with
builder if you are only adding fragments of the Glade file,
it should be easier for you to keep every fragment in a separate
Glade file and always build the whole interface.

Cheers,
           -Tristan