9.5. Dialogs

The Dialog widget is very simple, and is actually just a window with a few things pre-packed into it for you. The structure for a Dialog is:

struct GtkDialog
{
      GtkWindow window;
    
      GtkWidget *vbox;
      GtkWidget *action_area;
};

So you see, it simply creates a window, and then packs a vbox into the top, which contains a separator and then an hbox called the "action_area".

The Dialog widget can be used for pop-up messages to the user, and other similar tasks. It is really basic, and there is only one function for the dialog box, which is:

GtkWidget *gtk_dialog_new( void );

So to create a new dialog box, use,

    GtkWidget *window;
    window = gtk_dialog_new ();

This will create the dialog box, and it is now up to you to use it. You could pack a button in the action_area by doing something like this:

    button = ...
    gtk_box_pack_start (GTK_BOX (GTK_DIALOG (window)->action_area),
                        button, TRUE, TRUE, 0);
    gtk_widget_show (button);

And you could add to the vbox area by packing, for instance, a label in it, try something like this:

    label = gtk_label_new ("Dialogs are groovy");
    gtk_box_pack_start (GTK_BOX (GTK_DIALOG (window)->vbox),
                        label, TRUE, TRUE, 0);
    gtk_widget_show (label);

As an example in using the dialog box, you could put two buttons in the action_area, a Cancel button and an Ok button, and a label in the vbox area, asking the user a question or giving an error etc. Then you could attach a different signal to each of the buttons and perform the operation the user selects.

If the simple functionality provided by the default vertical and horizontal boxes in the two areas doesn't give you enough control for your application, then you can simply pack another layout widget into the boxes provided. For example, you could pack a table into the vertical box.