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Overview of IDL GUIBuilder

The IDL GUIBuilder is part of the IDLDE for Windows. The IDL GUIBuilder supplies you with a way to interactively create user interfaces and then generate the IDL source code that defines that interface and contains the event-handling routine place holders.


Tip
The GUIBuilder creates interfaces using IDL's standard widget toolkit, described in Creating Widget Applications. An understanding of how to control IDL's widgets programmatically is useful, but not necessary, when using the GUIBuilder.


Note
The IDL GUIBuilder is supported on Windows only. However, the code it generates is portable and runs on all IDL supported platforms. Since applications built with IDL GUIBuilder may require functionality added in the current release, generated code only runs on the version of IDL you generated the code on or greater.

The IDL GUIBuilder has several tools that simplify application development. These tools allow you to create the widgets that make up user interfaces, define the behavior of those widgets, define menus, and create and edit color bitmaps for use in buttons.


Note
When using code generated by the IDL GUIBuilder on other non-Windows platforms, more consistent results are obtained by using a row or column layout for your bases instead of a bulletin board layout. By using a row or column layout, problems caused by differences in the default spacing and decorations (e.g., beveling) of widgets on each platform can be avoided

These are the basic steps you will follow when building an application interface using the IDL GUIBuilder:

  1. Interactively design and create a user interface using the components, or widgets, supplied in the IDL GUIBuilder. Widgets are simple graphical objects supported by IDL, such as sliders or buttons.

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  2. Set attributes for each widget. The attributes control the display, initial state, and behavior of the widget.

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  3. Set event properties for each widget. Each widget has a set of events to which it can respond. When you design and create an application, it is up to you to decide if and how a widget will respond to the events it can generate. The first step to having a widget respond to an event is to supply an event procedure name for that event.

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  4. Save the interface design to an IDL resource file, *.prc file, and generate the portable IDL source code files. There are two types of generated IDL source code: widget definition code (*.pro files) and event-handling code (*_eventcb.pro files).

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  5. Modify the generated *_eventcb.pro event-handling code file using the IDLDE, then compile and run the code. This code can run on any IDL-supported platform.

The *_eventcb.pro file contains place holders for all of the event procedures you defined for the widgets, and you complete the file by filling in the necessary event callback routines for each procedure.


Warning
Once you have generated the widget definition code (*.pro files), you should not modify this file manually. If you decide to change your interface definition, you will need to regenerate the interface code, and will therefore overwrite that *.pro file. Any new event handling code will not be overwritten but will instead be appended.

For information about IDL widgets, and how to create user interfaces programmatically (without the IDL GUIBuilder), see Creating Widget Applications.

  IDL Online Help (March 06, 2007)