Volume 6A: Motif Programming Manual

8 Custom Dialogs

This chapter describes how to create new types of dialogs, either by customizing Motif dialogs or by creating entirely

new dialogs.

In this chapter we examine methods for creating your own dialogs. The need for such dialogs exists when those

provided by Motif are too limited in functionality or are not specialized enough for your application. Sometimes it is

not clear when you need to create your own dialog. In some situations, you may find that a Motif dialog would be just

fine if only they did this one little thing. Fortunately, you can often make small adjustments to a predefined Motif

dialog, rather than building an entirely new dialog box from scratch.

There are some issues to consider before you decide how you want to approach the problem of developing custom

dialogs. For example, do you want to use your own widget layout or is the layout of one of the predefined dialogs

sufficient? Do you have specialized user−-interface appearance and functionality needs that go beyond what is

provided by Motif? The answers to these questions affect the design of your dialogs. The discussion and examples

provided in this chapter address both scenarios. We provide information on how to create dialogs that are based on the

predefined Motif dialogs, as well as how to design completely new dialogs.

Before we get started, we should mention that creating your own dialogs makes heavy use of manager widgets, such

as the Form, BulletinBoard, RowColumn, and PanedWindow widgets. While we use ...