 
 subsubsection3_3_3_6.html  subsection3_3_3.html  subsubsection3_3_3_4.html  tableofcontents3_1.html   Next: subsubsection3_3_3_6.html Configuring Subwidget Options Up: subsection3_3_3.html Accessing The Components  Previous: subsubsection3_3_3_4.html Chaining the subwidget    Configuring Subwidget Options Using the -options Switch  
As we have seen above, we can use commands like ``
subwidget name configure ...'' to set the configuration options of
  subwidgets. However, this can get quite tedious if we want to configure
  many options of many subwidgets.
There is a more convenient and terse way to configure the subwidget options
  without using the 
subwidget method: the -options switch. All
  Tix mega-widgets support the 
-option switch, which can be used
  during the creation of the mega-widget.
  tixControl .income -label "Income: " -variable income -options {    label.width       8
    label.anchor      e
    entry.width       10
    entry.borderWidth 3
}
tixControl .age    -label "Age: "    -variable age    -options {
    label.width       8
    label.anchor      e
    entry.width       10
    entry.borderWidth 3
}
pack .income .age -side top
(Figure 1-5) Using the -options switch    
  (Figure 1-6) Using the -options Switch to Align the Labels    
The use of the 
-options switch is illustrated in program
  1-5, which creates two TixControl widgets for
  the user to enter his income and age. Because of the different sizes
  of the labels of these two widgets, if we create them haphazardly,
  the output may look like fig 1-6.
To avoid this problem, we set the width of the 
label  subwidgets of the 
.income and .age widgets to be the
  same (8 characters wide) and set their 
-anchor option to e (flushed to right), so that the labels appear to be
  well-aligned. Program 1-5 also does other
  things such as setting the 
entry subwidgets to have a width of
  10 characters and a border-width of 3 pixels so that they appear
  wider and ``deeper''. A better result is shown in figure
  1-6.
  As we can see from program 1-5, the value for
  the 
-options switch is a list of one or more pairs of
 subwidget-option-spec value ..
subwidget-option-spec is in the form subwidget-name.option-name. For example, label.anchor identifies the
 
anchor option of the label subwidget, entry.width identifies the 
width option of the entry subwidget, and so on.
Notice we must use the 
name of the option, not the command-line switch of the option. For example, the option that
 specifies the border-width of the 
entry subwidget has the
 command-line switch 
-borderwidth but its name is borderWidth (notice the capitalization on the name but not on the
 command-line switch). Therefore, we have used the capitalized version
 of ``
entry.borderWidth 3'' in program
 1-5 and not ``
entry.borderwidth 3''. To
 find out the names of the options of the respective subwidgets,
 please refer to their manual pages.
http://tix.sourceforge.nethttp://tix.sourceforge.net 