Manual Editing of estron files

This tutorial will develop as the support is developed and will grow a GUI tutorial as the GUI itself becomes available. For now, this term paper is limited to preparing and testing estron files by manually editing existing examples.

Prepare a glade file.

Design a main window, an about dialogue and then other windows to maybe inspect individual records in more detail. Glade ensures that all your labels and widgets have unique names but it is much easier if you rename widgets as you go so that the name describes something about what the widget is meant to do and represent.

Modify an existing estron file

Load the testbasic.estron file to view the documentation within that file as you modify your own estron file.

To load the glade file (with errors), simply change the window tag in the estron file to point to the Glade file in the same directory.

The element is used to identify an application window and the file which describes the window's graphical layout.

1. The keyword "provider" identifies the graphical layout engine.Currently, the only supported values are "glade" and "self". (Other providers e.g. for web/PHP are envisioned.) The "glade" provider requires a glade filename that defines the user interface, and the root widget name.
2. The keyword "name" identifies this window for the purpose of having forms and reports reference this window to read from and write to it.
3. The keyword "filename" specifies the filepath to the Glade XML file.
4. The keyword "root_widget" specifies a root widget (typically a top level window) under which the other widgets can be found.
5. The keyword "main" indicates whether or not this window is the main application window. The use of this keyword is optional; if its value is "yes", then this window will be displayed on application startup.

Now run the glade file using the estron interpreter to view the syntax errors and see the first view of the window.

$ estron test.estron