Using visualruby to edit a Hash

I am new to visualruby. I am looking for a way to display and alter the
contents of a Hash. I have code that uses VRuby from ruby 1.8.7 that
would take a hash and dynamically display a dialog with drop-downs,
tree-lists, edit boxes, check boxes, buttons, etc. depending of the type
of the hash key,value entry.
I have been experimenting with VR::ListView, but is seems that I can
only have one display type per column.
Is there perhaps a way to dynamically add items(widgets?) to a Glade
form?

For example how could I display and gather values from a window similar
to this post form?

Hi:

One way to add widgets to a glade form is to place empty vbox and hbox
widgets to your form using the glade interface designer, then fill them
in later with your code.

For example, add a vbox to your form with 1 empty row. You can keep the
name “vbox1”. Later, in your code, you can do this:

@dropdown = VR::SimpleComboBoxEntry(“choice”, “choice2”)
@builder[“vbox1”].add(@dropdown)

Then the vbox1 widget will be filled with the dropdown entry widget.

Currently, the way you’d update your hash is by putting a submit button
on the form, and making a method to handle the click event. You make
the method name with the naming convention with two underscores. If you
had a submit button called “submitButton” the method would be:

def submitButton__clicked(*args)
@hash[“name”] = @builder[“nameWidget”]
etc…
end

If you wanted to dynamically change each field when the widget changed
value, It would be something like this:

def nameWidget__changed(*args)
@hash[“name”] = @builder[“nameWidget”]
end

Does this help?

Eric

Thanks for the reply. I would like to be able to build the form with a
variable number of entries.

The first example (adapted from one of the samples) was a ListView with
rows for each hash entry.
When I click on the value column of each row the appropriate widget is
displayed (editbox, dropdown, etc.) where I can alter the value. This
works, but I would like to find a way to do it all (or at least most of
it) on one form.

I think that I understand using vbox1 and adding a widget to it. I
think that it is directly covered in one of the examples.

Can I add vbox’s to an existing glade form at run time?
Or can I add multiple widgets via @builder[“vbox1”].add(@xxx)
@builder[“vbox1”].add(@yyy)?

Or can I have a max number of vbox place holders in the form and hide
them if I don’t need them? Assuming they would take no space in the
form if they aren’t used.

Thanks for the help!

Hi Hans:

I beleive that you can do all the things that you described in your last
post. Gtk is made so you can add widgets to containers (see pack_start
etc.) However, this is a Gtk issue not a visualruby issue. Remember
that visualruby is just working with Gtk objects in the same way that
you do in your code. You will need to get a reference to the gtk
object:

@contain = @builder[“myBox”]
@container.add(…)

You will need to consult the ruby-gnome docs. My goal is to simplify
all of this.

I think you’re headed in the right direction.

I’m trying to map data types directly to widgets, so when you write
code, you don’t even have to worry about how they are displayed. For
example, a string in your code would map to a label or a textbox etc.

Eric