Glade UI Dialogs and UNO extensions

[Caolán McNamara]

On Tue, 2014-01-07 at 15:05 -0200, Olivier Hallot wrote:
> Hi
> 
> I have a demand to tweak some dialogs with better layout or widgets
> positions. In order to avoid disruption with the core development, I
> would like to know if these .ui dialogs can be packed into UNO extensions.

What you want to do is to effectively over-ride/replace existing .ui
files which isn't something I had considered doing at all. I have no
plans around that. 

I guess it wouldn't be impossible to e.g. in VclBuilder::VclBuilder
where the sUIDir, sUIFile and sID of the dialog are passed in to there
see if there any listeners to a hypothetical uiload event and ask them
if the want to provide a .ui for that case to use instead of the normal
one.

Or maybe some config settings to set some override dirs which would be
searched before the standard one to find the .ui. Obviously tweaking
things here would be necessarily very fragile. One could move elements,
hide them, change default buttons and those would generally work but
adding and removing stuff wouldn't generally work.

For the more normal case where extensions want to use the .ui for their
own dialogs I sort of plan to allow that once all the normal dialogs are
converted over and then make a careful glade catalog to describe the
awt-view of the uno-api widgets, figure out the existing translation
stuff for extension widgets and see what the right thing to do there is.

C.