[comp.windows.x] Dynamic resource sharing by widgets

ISSLCK@NUSVM.BITNET (Law Chee Keong) (05/04/88)

I have a question regarding the X Toolkit.

Let's say I want to make a group of widgets share some common
resources, like Fonts and Colors and so forth. The Toolkit's
Resource Manager takes care of that with the XtC resource classes.

Now, suppose I do not know which resources a group of widgets will
share until run-time, how can I dynamically specify widget resource
sharing through the Toolkit, or is such a facility supplied?

This problem crops up when I allow users to interactively group
widgets together, and then allow the user to key in the resources
the widgets are to share. Right now, it seems the X Toolkit does not
cater for this. Anyone has suggestions??

-C.K. Law
 ISS-NUS
 Singapore

haynes@WSL.DEC.COM (05/05/88)

Actually resource sharing is done on a much broader basis than simply
the XtC resource classes. All resources are cached and shared if
possible. This means you do not need to do anything special to get
dynamic resource sharing, as long as you are using the resource manager
to obtain your resources.

	-- Charles

diamant@hpfclp.SDE.HP.COM (John Diamant) (05/08/88)

> From: ISSLCK@NUSVM.BITNET (Law Chee Keong)
> 
> Now, suppose I do not know which resources a group of widgets will
> share until run-time, how can I dynamically specify widget resource
> sharing through the Toolkit, or is such a facility supplied?
> 
> From: haynes@WSL.DEC.COM
> 
> This means you do not need to do anything special to get
> dynamic resource sharing, as long as you are using the resource manager
> to obtain your resources.

Charles, I think he was asking a slightly different question than you
answered.  I believe the problem is that he wants the user to
be able to specify what widget resources have particular names so that they
may be shared (if they use the same name).  I may be wrong about this
interpration, but it is what I think is being asked.  If my assessment
of the question is correct, then it is a property of the specific widgets
being used.  There is no reason that widgets could not look up their
resources strings dynamically from some global data structure if that
is what were desired, rather than using hard-coded strings as they normally
are (XtN and XtC).  However, that means the widget initialization
procedure would require some global variables to be around in which to
find the resource names and classes.  This would be a great burden to place
on the programmers using the widgets, and it also breaks the object
oriented model (not that it would be the first time), but it is
possible.

John Diamant
Software Development Environments
Hewlett-Packard Co.		ARPA Internet: diamant@hpfclp.sde.hp.com
Fort Collins, CO		UUCP:  {hplabs,hpfcla}!hpfclp!diamant