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From: nazgul@alphalpha.com (Kee Hinckley)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x.motif
Subject: Re: PushButton Pixmap problems
Message-ID: <901022120152.2760@alphalpha>
Date: 22 Oct 90 16:01:52 GMT
References: <9010221401.AA17882@osf.osf.org>
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
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> In version 1.1 the restriction on the directories for XmGetPixmap are
> actually loser than this implies.  First, the user can specify an
> environment variable XBMLANGPATH which will be used to generate a set of
> default paths.  Second, XmGetPixmap will recognize an absolute path on a
> Unix system (a path beginning with '/') and use that as the file to open.
> Finally, the current working directory is always searched by default if
> neither an absolute path or XBMLANGPATH are specified.  If you have any
> more questions on this please ask me.

This is the same approach that XOpen took with the message catalog
system and it has a flaw.  Let's say I want to be nice to the user
and let them override the default icon, so I don't give it a full path.
However I store all of my application information in a particular
directory.  How do I reconcile those?  I can't override the XBMLANGPATH
because the user may have set it.  If I use a full path then XBMLANGPATH
won't be used.  I can't require the user to put my directory in the
environment variable. Ideally there should be a call to add a new 
directory to the search path - this makes life much easier.

While I'm on the subject, there are a couple of other calls of use 
here.  One is when I already have a pixmap and want to add it (with
a name) to the cache.  Another is to check and see if something is
already in the cache.

Finally, and more critically.  For many of my dialogs I need to add
a few buttons, so I use a selection dialog and add a child (be real
nice if I could add a child to a message dialog - but anyway...).
In those dialogs I want to use one of the standard icons.  It took
me a *long* time to figure out why most of the time the icons
never showed up - but occasionally they would.  It turns out that
the icons are not put in the cache until the first time a message 
dialog is created.  This really ought to be made more global.  As it
is I now have the following call at the beginning of my code:

    XtDestroyChild(XmCreateMessageBox(parent, "", NULL, 0));

It looks pretty silly, but it does the trick.