Volume 6A: Motif Programming Manual

Wildcard Specifications@No@Yes@No User Customization@No@Yes@No Dynamic Updating@Yes@No@Yes

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27.4 Using Lists Effectively

Lists are a powerful feature of UIL because they give you an alternative to specifying widget children, callbacks, and

arguments directly in a widget definition. Lists also let you specify multiple procedures for a specific callback

resource. The ability to include lists in other lists makes them even more useful, as we'll show you in this section.

27.4.1 Specifying Common Resources

We talked about reusing interface components and callbacks earlier. By using lists, you can take this technique one

step further to the level of widget children, resources, and callbacks. You can reduce the size of your modules by

using lists to factor out common sets of resources. This technique is particularly useful for dealing with Form resource

settings, as this fragment illustrates:

list attachments : arguments {

XmNleftAttachment = XmATTACH_FORM;

XmNleftOffset = 3;

XmNrightAttachment = XmATTACH_FORM;

XmNrightOffset = 3;

};

The attachments list defines some attachments that we can apply to a group of widgets in a Form, as shown in the

following definitions:

object name : XmTextField {

arguments {

arguments attach_args;

XmNtopAttachment = XmATTACH_FORM;

};

};

object phone : XmTextField {

arguments {

arguments attach_args;

XmNtopAttachment = XmATTACH_WIDGET;

XmNtopWidget = name;

XmNbottomAttachment = XmATTACH_FORM;

};

Each TextField definition includes its own attachments and the list, ...