Volume 6A: Motif Programming Manual

6 Introduction to Dialogs

This chapter describes the fundamental concepts that underly all Motif dialogs. It provides a foundation for the more

advanced material in the following chapters. In the course of the introduction, the chapter also provides information

about Motif's predefined MessageDialog classes.

In Chapter 4, The Main Window, we discussed the top−level windows that are managed by the window manager and

that provide the overall framework for an application. Most applications are too complex to do everything in one main

top−level window. Situations arise that call for secondary windows, or transient windows, that serve specific

purposes. These windows are commonly referred to as dialog boxes, or more simply as dialogs.

Dialog boxes play an integral role in a GUI−based interface such as Motif. The examples in this book use dialogs in

many ways, so just about every chapter can be used to learn more about dialogs. We've already explored some of the

basic concepts in Chapter 2, The Motif Programming Model, and Chapter 3, Overview of the Motif Toolkit.

However, the use of dialogs in Motif is quite complex, so we need more detail to proceed further.

The Motif Style Guide makes a set of generic recommendations about how all dialogs should look. The Style Guide

also specifies precisely how certain dialogs should look, how they should respond to user events, and under what

circumstances the dialogs should be used. We refer to these dialogs as predefined Motif dialogs, since the Motif

toolkit ...