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From: jelarcic@athena.ecs.csus.edu (Michael L. Jelarcic)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: DECwindows for VMS questions
Message-ID: <1991Feb16.103240.23790@csusac.csus.edu>
Date: 16 Feb 91 10:32:40 GMT
Sender: usenet@csusac.csus.edu (News account (alt))
Organization: California State University, Sacramento
Lines: 79


howdy,

    I have several questions concerning DECwindows that I thought someone
might be able to answer for me.  my code needs to work for all production
versions of the DECwindows (which we've managed to do so far since I wrote
the initial code under FT1!)

	1) starting with VMS 5.3 there is a convience routine called
	   DwtActivateWidget() which basically activates a pushbutton.
	   Since the products my company makes has to support several
	   versions of VMS I had to write my own routine to do the same
	   function (we recently extended some functionality that included
	   option menus and activating the pushbutton was the only way
	   to set the selected item in the option menu at runtime, no
	   could not use menuHistory since this is a one shot deal and the
	   option menus are called several times with differing initial
	   values).  Does the following code fragment satisfy the Dwt routine?

	   local_DwtActivateWidget( Widget w )
	   {
		XEvent xe;

		xe.type = ButtonPress;
		xe.disp = disp;
		xe.win = win;
		xe.button = Button1Mask;
		XtCallCallbacks( w, "XtactivateCallback", &xe );
	   }

	   forgive any typos this is from memory.  this piece of code
	   works fine but should I also call the arm callbacks?

	2) is it possible to make a list box have a specific width that never
	   changes regardless of the width of it's entries?  the low-level
	   routine definition of the list box specifies a resize attribute.
	   I set this attribute in my uil to DwtResizeFixed and set the
	   width to 30 and the list box only shows a few *pixels* of the
	   entries (basically it ignores the width attribute and ass_u_mes
	   a width of the zero plus the few pixels for margins). 
	   if I leave out the resize attribute the list box shrinks and
	   grows with the longest entry as is it supposed to.

	3) what is the routine that writes out the the application's
	   resource file?  there is a whole slew of routines in Xlib for
	   managing resource databases including XrmPutFileDatabase().
	   its fairly obvious that the toolkit maintains a resource db
	   but I've RTFM and could not find a way to find out the XrmDatbase
	   for my application, how does DEC do this?

	4) how does one go about setting the backing store attribute for
	   a whole hierarchy of widgets, do I need to set it for the
	   application context widget (aka top level widget) or should I
	   care?  we recently got in a Tektronix XP29 which is the first
	   server in our shop that actually supports backing store and
	   I wanted to add this in.  I monitored the expose events my
	   application was receiving and they only occured when my application
	   was mapped, the backing store attribute for the server was set
	   for AlwaysWhenMapped.  this seems to work correctly, but I
	   did *not* change backing store attribute anywhere in my application.

	5) why the heck doesn't the stupid toolkit return a valid height
	   for a menu bar via XGetValues?!?  The application is basically
	   a constraint scroll window where the scroll bars properly place
	   the work window when changed but w/o all the junk necessary to
	   be a new widget.  To do all this I have to track ConfigureNotify
	   events for the menu bar in addition to ConfigureNotify events
	   for the top level widget to calculate the constraints. the
	   ConfigureNotify events are necessary for the top level since I
	   dyanmically unmanage/manage the scroll bars if the window is at
	   it's maximum size or not, but I would not have to track the events
	   for the menu bar if XGetValues() worked.

I hope someone out there in Usenetland can help me out with some of 
these, email or posted replies. Thanx.

	      mikey
Michael L. Jelarcic				jelarcic@athena.csusac.edu
"Who said what?!?  We don't know him... go away..." - my employer