Chapter 3. GNOME-DB Widget Library

3.1. Introduction

This library contains a rich set of GNOME widgets that provide an easy way of including the GDA model into your GNOME applications.

All the widgets are GTK+ widgets, which means that you get an object-oriented approach to your user interface. This will allow you, for example, to write a custom widget for your application implementing just the extra functionality. The basic behavior is already implemented by the GDA widget.

This also means that you can attach procedures to the widgets' received signals, as you do with GTK+/GNOME widgets. In fact, GNOME-DB widgets inform of their behavior by emitting signals that can be caught by your application to get information for the event signaled.

For example, the GnomeDbBrowser widget contains lots of child widgets, which in turn catch user events, which are then caught by the GnomeDbBrowser widget itself. The latter propagates some of these events by emitting it's own signals. Thus, you can, for example, know the interaction the user is doing with the widget to update a status bar message, show a dialog box when an error occurs, etc.

The widgets provided by the GNOME-DB library cover almost all you need to develop user interfaces for your database-oriented applications. If your needs are not covered, you have two choices: ask us to do the widget you want, or, implement your own by sub-classing the most suitable GNOME-DB widget. If you prefer the second method, you should have a look at the GTK+ documentation, especially the 'Writing your Own Widgets' chapter.

The widgets contained in the library are: