X/Motif Programming

Creating a widget is referred to as instantiating it. You ask the toolkit for an instance of a particular widget class, which can be customized by setting its resources. A widget in Motif can be created by using a specific function for creating each widget or by using convenience functions for generic widget creation and even by creating and managing widgets with a single function call to XtVaCreateManagedWidget.

In general, we create a widget using the function XmCreatewidgetname. To create a pushbutton widget, we use XmCreatePushButton. Similarly, to create a menu bar, we use XmCreateMenuBar.

Most XmCreatewidgetname functions take four arguments:

The argument list can be used to set widget resources such as the widget's initial height and width.

Once a widget is created, it must be managed. XtManageChild is a function that performs this task. A widget's parent manages the child's size and location, determines whether the child is visible, and may also control input to the child.

When this happens, all aspects of the widget are placed under the control of its parent. The most important aspect of this is that if a widget is left unmanaged, it will remain invisible even when the parent is displayed. This provides a mechanism with which we can control the visibility of a widget. Note that if a parent widget is not managed, a child widget will remain invisible even if the child is managed.

However, one function actually creates and manages a widget. This function is called XtVaCreateManagedWidget, which can be used to create and manage any widget.

An event is defined to be any mouse action (such as clicking on a button or a menu bar option) or keyboard action such as pressing ENTER or any input device action. The effects of an event are numerous, and include window resizing, window repositioning and invoking functions available from the GUI.

When a widget is created, it will automatically respond to certain internal events, such as a window manager's request to change size or color and changing its appearance when pressed. This is because Xt and Motif frees the application program from the burden of having to intercept and process most of these events. However, in order to be useful to the application programmer, a widget must be easily attached to application functions. Widgets must be hooked up to application functions via callback resources.

X handles events asynchronously. It basically takes a continuous stream of events and then dispatches them to applications, which then take appropriate actions.

If you write programs in Xlib, there are many low-level functions available for handling events. Xt, however, simplifies the event-handling task, since widgets are capable of handling many events for us, such as automatic redraw and response to mouse presses.

The functionality of a widget encompasses its behavior in response to user events. Each widget defines a table of events, called the translation table, to which it responds. The translation table maps each event, or sequence of events, to one or more actions. Full details of each widget's response can be found in the Motif Reference material.

Translations and actions allow a widget class to define associations between events and widget functions. For any application program, Motif will provide only the GUI. The main body of the application will be attached to the GUI and functions called from various events within the GUI.

To do this in Motif, we have to add our own callback functions. In helloworld.c, we have a function pushButton which prints to the standard output.

The function XtAddCallback is the most commonly used function to attach a function to a widget. XtAddCallback has four arguments:

In addition to performing a job like highlighting the widget, each event action can also call a program function.