Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!ogicse!mintaka!bloom-beacon!eng.sun.COM!smarks
From: smarks@eng.sun.COM (Stuart W. Marks)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: ICCCM question about raising windows
Message-ID: <9004110124.AA06170@trantor.Eng.Sun.COM>
Date: 11 Apr 90 01:24:21 GMT
References: <9004092038.AA07859@sae.com>
Sender: daemon@athena.mit.edu (Mr Background)
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 47


|    When the user asks the application to display a window that is already
|    created, but obscured, I would like to be able to just raise it rather
|    than recreate it.
| 
|    If the application is running under a reparenting window manager, I
|    obviously can't raise the window of the Shell widget I created. Is it
|    OK to walk up the window's parents until I get to the root window, and
|    raise child of root that I find?

Actually, you do simply raise the Shell widget.  (But I agree that it isn't
obvious.)  This works because a reparenting window manager will have
selected for SubstructureRedirect on its parent window, so the request to
raise the window will get redirected to the window manager.  Thus, issuing
an XRaiseWindow call (or whatever) on the Shell widget is always the right
thing to do.

Now, it's not guaranteed that the window manager will honor your
application's request to raise the window to the top.  Some window
managers will decide that they don't want to honor stacking order
requests, and so your application will have to live with that.

Please don't walk around the window hierarchy and manipulate windows that
you think are the right ones.  There's a possibility that the direct child
of root that you find isn't the window manager's parent window, but is a
pseudo-root window of some sort.  Raising this window is NOT what you want
to do!

|    I don't see this situation covered in the ICCCM. If it is, could someone
|    please quote me chapter and verse.

There's a discussion of stacking order requests towards the end of section
4.1.5 of the ICCCM.  

|    If my workaround shouldn't be used,
|    could someone suggest a portable way for communicating the raise request
|    to the window manager?

Using XRaiseWindow (or other configuration requests) directly on the Shell
is the most portable way.  It's certainly more portable than searching the
window tree.

s'marks

Stuart W. Marks			ARPA: smarks@eng.sun.com
Window Systems Group		UUCP: sun!smarks
Sun Microsystems, Inc.