Creating a Ui Manager

Creating a Ui Manager is easy:

ui=GTK2.UiManager();

Now add your ActionGroups:

ui->insert_action_group(gt1,0);

The parameter is the position. If you have a two groups called the same name, then the group with the lower number (earlier) will hide a high number (later) group.

Now you want to add your ui definition, but first you'll have to create it:

This can be in a separate file, to make menu editing easy:

<ui>
  <menubar name='MyMenuBar'>
    <menu action='FileMenu'>
      <menuitem action='FileNew'/>
      <menuitem action='FileOpen'/>
      <separator/>
      <menuitem action='FileQuit'/>
    </menu>
    <menu action='EditMenu'>
      <menuitem action='EditCopy'/>
      <menuitem action='EditPaste'/>
    </menu>
  </menubar>
  <toolbar name='MyToolBar'>
    <toolitem action='myfirstaction'/>
    <toolitem action='my2action'/>
    <separator/>
    <toolitem action='Quit'>
  </toolbar>
</ui>

This is a sample xml definition of a menu structure, with a toolbar. It can be several levels deep by just using a menu instead of a menuitem.

Now, just add the ui definition(s) to the ui:

int id=ui->add_ui_from_file("menu.xml");

You can also add from a string with ui->add_ui_from_string();

The return value is an id you can use to remove the ui definition from the ui manager. The ui's get merged.

All this is a bunch of convenient shortcuts for doing it all by hand with: ui->new_merge_id() and ui->add_ui().

UiManager takes all this info and creates the appropriate widgets. You can get the widgets for packing into your containers (vbox or whatever) with the following:

object menub=ui->get_widget("/MyMenuBar");
object toolb=ui->get_widget("/MyToolBar");

Where "MyMenuBar" and "MyToolBar" are the names you used for the menubar and toolbar in the xml definition. The / means that it will search from the top of the xml tree.

If you want to get the widget for a specific action, you can do something like:

object widget=ui->get_widget("/MyMenuBar/EditMenu/EditCopy");

This will get the widget for the menu item EditCopy from the example xml definition above.

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