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From: nazgul@alphalpha.com (Kee Hinckley)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: UIL or NOT to UIL
Message-ID: <1990Mar19.161533.13651@alphalpha.com>
Date: 19 Mar 90 16:15:33 GMT
References: <777@auto-trol.UUCP>
Organization: asi
Lines: 88

In article <777@auto-trol.UUCP> marbru@auto-trol.COM () writes:
>    definition by replacing UIL.  I am posting an overview of this "POOR
>    MAN'S  UIL"  here  to  get  some  feedback  on.   If there is enough
>    interest, I can post the code, which has been tested with Motif  and
>    other widgets on SPARC, Ultrix/RISC and VMS/VAX, on comp.sources.x.
...

A couple concerns.

1)  The major thing which keeps me from totally dumping UIL is compound
string support.  In fact however, UIL doesn't even provide the kind of
support that I need (how do I use UIL to put up the message:
    Sorry, there is no mail from John.
Where "John" is English and everything else is Farsi?).  I think the
real solution there is a message-catalog-style UIL interface.  Presumbably
you could do something like this in the Xresources file using some kind
of character encoding for the international strings, and special escape
sequences for program input strings, but I don't know how easy it would
be, and it probably wouldn't be useful without a program to construct
them.  This isn't really specific to your UIL replacement of course, just
a general concern.

2) Consider the following (somewhat fragmented) XmForm code, how would
your solution handle it.

/*
 * The first issue here is that we have massive references to other
 * widgets.  That presumbably can be handled?
 */

    SETARG(XmNtopAttachment, XmATTACH_FORM);
    SETARG(XmNleftAttachment, XmATTACH_FORM);
    leftWidget = XmCreateLabelGadget(form, "Name:", args, i);
    XtManageChild(leftWidget);
    
    SETARG(XmNleftAttachment, XmATTACH_WIDGET);
    SETARG(XmNleftWidget, leftWidget);
    SETARG(XmNrightAttachment, XmATTACH_FORM);
    rightWidget = XmCreateForm(form, "name", args, i);
    XtManageChild(rightWidget);

/* ATTACH_OPPOSITE is a misnomer.  It actually means ALIGN_EDGES. */

    SETARG(XmNtopAttachment, XmATTACH_WIDGET);
    SETARG(XmNtopWidget, rightWidget);
    SETARG(XmNrightAttachment, XmATTACH_OPPOSITE_WIDGET);
    SETARG(XmNrightWidget, leftWidget);
    leftWidget = XmCreateLabelGadget(form, "Address:", args, i);
    XtManageChild(leftWidget);
    
/*
 * The second issue is with convenience routines which create widgets
 * behind your back.  Note here that the widget pointer I have to use
 * to set the constraint resources is a hidden parent of ScrollText.
 *
 * By the by.  Does anyone know how this works in UIL?  I haven't tested
 * it yet. My guess is that it either doesn't work, or is hard-coded into
 * the UIL code (let's hear it for extensibility!).  There is actually
 * a way to do it without hardcoding - namely you check to see if the
 * parent of a widget is the same as the parent you gave it, if not you
 * keep moving up the widget ree until you find the parent pointer, then
 * use the one just below it.  That way works even if the implementation
 * changes, whereas the code below would probably break.
 */
    SETARG(XmNeditMode, XmMULTI_LINE_EDIT);
    rightWidget = XmCreateScrolledText(form, "address", args, i);

    SETARG(XmNtopAttachment, XmATTACH_OPPOSITE_WIDGET);
    SETARG(XmNtopWidget, leftWidget);
    SETARG(XmNleftAttachment, XmATTACH_WIDGET);
    SETARG(XmNleftWidget, leftWidget);
    SETARG(XmNrightAttachment, XmATTACH_FORM);
    XtSetValues(XtParent(rightWidget), args, i);
    XtManageChild(rightWidget);


Incidentally.  OSF did at one point consider using an extended
Xresources form as an alternative to UIL, but was convinced (I forget
the exact reasons) that it wasn't appropriate (too hacky?).

							-kee
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