27 Advanced UIL Programming
This chapter describes advanced concepts and programming techniques in UIL. It builds on the UIL material
explained in the previous chapters.
This chapter introduces and examines ways that you can make the most of UIL's more advanced features. In the
following sections, we describe how to add non−Motif widgets to an interface description, discuss methods and ideas
for organizing UIL files, and examine the considerations that you face when setting resources in UIL. Finally, we
present material on advanced uses of UIL lists and user−interface prototyping.
27.1 Using Non−Motif Widgets
With UIL, it is easy to define instances of any of the Motif widgets, because their type names are built into the
compiler. However, you may need to use your own widget or a third−party widget in an application to provide
functionality that is not available in the Motif widget set. Fortunately, it is possible to include other widgets using the
special user_defined widget class along with the argument and reason value types.
OSF/Motif also supports non−Motif widget descriptions using the widget meta−language (WML). These widgets are
written into a separate WML description file which is run through the WML compiler. WML is typically used for
describing alternative widget sets; many third party widget sets include compiled WML description files. The use of
compiled WML description files is covered in #suilwmlopt, but a complete description of WML syntax and usage is
beyond the scope of this ...