Hello, As you may know, I took part in Google Summer of Code this year (thanks to Juan for mentoring me!) and worked on "GObject property binding support for GtkBuilder and Glade":
https://live.gnome.org/DenisWashington_GtkBuilder While talking on IRC with Tristan yesterday, I realized that while I sent out weekly reports to gnome-soc-list and blogged about my work twice, I never actually wrote anything about the code's status or technical details on this mailing list. I would like to apologize for my failure to do so and will try to make up for it by telling you *everything* in this message: what I have done, how I have done it, what works now, where the remaining problems are, and how these issues could be overcome (this is where I really need your feedback!). For those who don't know, the objective of my work is to extend Glade with support for creating bindings between widget properties in a project. What this means is that you can define a property's value as being directly dependent on the value of another property - whenever the "source" property's value is set, the value of the "target" property is automatically updated, either to the same value or a user-defined transformation thereof (more on this later). GLib supports this through its GBinding API [1]. The goal is to expose this functionality in Glade so that the user can create, modify and delete property bindings in Glade and save them as part of a UI file. This feature requires changes to both GTK+ and Glade, so I created git.gnome.org branches for both of them, named "gtkbuilder-gbinding" and "gbinding", respectively [2][3]. The GTK+ branch adds support for a new bit of GtkBuilder syntax - the <binding> element - which makes it possible for GtkBuilder objects to read property bindings from UI files. It is used like this: <object name="button"> ... <binding to="sensitive" from="active" source="checkbutton"/> </object> which means: "Let the 'sensitive' property of 'button' always have the same value as the 'active' property of 'checkbutton'." Thanks to the existence of GBinding, the code changes required for this are pretty small. No new API is introduced; all bindings are automatically created at the time they are read in by gtk_builder_add_from*(). (But this might change slightly; see the problem discussion later in this epic mail message). The "gbinding" Glade branch is where the bulk of my work happened. It adds a new "binding-source" property to GladeProperty for representing property bindings in the data model and supports serialization and deserialization of this information to <binding> elements. (See glade_property_binding_read() and glade_property_binding_write() in glade-property.c, respectively.) Furthermore, it augments Glade's undo/redo framework with a glade_command_bind_property() command for creating and deleting property bindings. On the UI side, this command is exposed through a "Bind to source..." context menu item in the property inspector. (For screenshots of how the UI currently looks, see my blog posts [4][5].) The UI and data model has been adapted to reflect the defined property bindings: - glade_command_set_property() was modified to recursively set the value of all properties bound to the originally set property. This means that the effect of a property binding is immediately visible in the Glade workspace. - In the property inspector, the edit widgets for bound properties are insensitive (setting the value of a bound property doesn't make much sense). Also, the tooltip of a bound property shows which other property it is bound to. (See glade-editor-property.c) Also, I made some precautions to avoid invalid property bindings: - The "Bind to source..." dialog for choosing the source of a property binding only allows you to select properties that have the same, or a compatible, type, and are enabled (if they are optional) and sensitive (if there are one of multiple alternative properties, e.g. "text", "stock" and "embedded widget" in GtkButton). All other properties are greyed out and moved to the end of the list. (See glade_editor_property_show_bind_dialog() and its helper functions in glade-editor-property.c) - If the source or target of a property binding disappears because the widget it belongs to is deleted, the binding is automatically removed too. This is properly integrated into the undo/redo system, so undoing the widget removal also brings the property binding back. (See glade_command_delete_binding_refs() in glade-command.c) One remaining issue with the current code is that it does not react to property binding sources becoming disabled or insensitive. This is currently not possible in a sane way as changes to a property's enabled/sensitivity state are not tracked with the undo/redo framework at the moment. (I had code to do this in the branch before, but it worked with manual signal handling hackery and was removed later on Tristan's request.) The obvious solution would be to change this by introducing glade_command_set_property_enabled() and glade_command_set_property_sensitive() and porting all of Glade to that. If there is general agreement to do so, I would be willing to do that work. In any case, this has to be fixed in some way before the branch is ready to be merged into master. Other than that, I don't know of any other major showstoppers, but an extensive code review by Juan and Tristan might very well reveal some. ;) The big question, however, it how to support transformation functions for property bindings. This GBinding feature allows you to define a function that processes the value of a binding's source property before it is applied to the target, which allows you to create bindings between properties of different types and generally make property bindings much more useful and interesting. Adding this into the GTK+ and Glade branches is not a big problem in principle, and in fact I did just that during Summer of Code. However, I had to later remove the code again, the reason being on the GTK+/GLib side. The problem is when and how to resolve the transformation function names that would be stored in the GtkBuilder file to the actual function implementations. In my code, I moved all property binding creation to two new API functions, gtk_builder_create_bindings() and gtk_builder_create_bindings_full(), which take the same arguments as gtk_builder_connect_signals*() and locate transformation functions the same way (GModule or a custom callback, called GtkBuilderBindingFunc). Unfortunately, this setup means more work for language binding authors: because transformation functions are specified as an argument to g_object_bind_property_full() rather than by connecting a signal, a language-specific GtkBuilderConnectFunc for gtk_builder_connect_signals*() cannot be reused and each language binding would be required to provide a GtkBuilderBindingFunc to replace the use of GModule with something appropriate for the language. Also, the introduction of another function to be called for every loaded GtkBuilder function is really not ideal. Talking with Juan and Tristan, we concluded that a proper solution probably requires changes to GBinding itself. More specifically, if GBinding implemented the transformation function as being the handler of a "transform" signal instead of an anonymous callback, one could reuse gtk_builder_connect_signals*() to locate transformation functions and move property binding creation there. For backwards compatibility and convenience, the g_object_bind_property() API could still stay as it is now. There would be some issues to sort out - for instance, how to behave if multiple signal handlers are connected to the "transform" signal - but it might be doable without breaking anything. This still needs to be talked about with both the GLib and GTK+ team, though. For reference, you can still find my code with transformation function support in the "gtkbuilder-gbinding" GTK+ and "gbinding-transform" Glade branch. Well, this is all there is to say about the code now. (This mail is already way too long as it is. ;) I hope you now have a better insight wrt what I have done during GSoC and what is still to do. As I wrote in the beginning, I need your feedback! If you have any questions, remarks, or suggestions regarding the issues I outlined - especially regarding the transformation function situation - I would be excited to hear them! Thanks. :) Regards, Denis [1] http://developer.gnome.org/gobject/unstable/GBinding.html [2] http://git.gnome.org/browse/gtk+/log/?h=gtkbuilder-gbinding [3] http://git.gnome.org/browse/glade/log/?h=gbinding [4] http://denwash.wordpress.com/2011/06/10/glade-and-property-binding-finally-something-to-see/ [5] http://denwash.wordpress.com/2011/07/20/glade-and-property-binding-create-your-own-bindings-now/ _______________________________________________ Glade-devel maillist - Glade-devel@lists.ximian.com http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/glade-devel
