Volume 6A: Motif Programming Manual

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 ...