Chapter 39. Dialogs

Inheritance Hierarchy

Object
   +--- Widget
         +--- Container
               +--- Bin
                     +--- Window
                           +--- Dialog
         

The Dialog widget is very simple, and is actually just a window with a few things pre-packed into it for you. Included in the Dialog widget is a window , vbox , and an action_area .

Dialogs simply creates a window, and then packs a VBox into the top, which contains a separator and then an HBox called the action_area .

The Dialog widget can be used for pop-up messages to the user, and other similar tasks. It is really basic, and there is only one function for the dialog box, which is:

$dialog = new Gtk::Dialog();

which creates the dialog box, and it is now up to you to use it. You could pack a button in the action_area by doing something like this:

        $button = new Gtk::Button( "Close" );
        $dialog->action_area->pack_start( $button, $true, $true, 0 );
        $button->show();

And you could add to the vbox area by packing, for instance, a label in it, try something like this:

        $label = new Gtk::Label( "Dialogs are groovy!" );
        $dialog->vbox->pack_start( $label, $true, $true, 0 );
        $label->show();

As an example in using the dialog box, you could put two buttons in the action_area, a Cancel button and an Ok button, and a label in the vbox area, asking the user a question or giving an error etc. Then you could attach a different signal to each of the buttons and perform the operation the user selects.

If the simple functionality provided by the default vertical and horizontal boxes in the two areas doesn't give you enough control for your application, then you can simply pack another layout widget into the boxes provided. For example, you could pack a table into the vertical box.