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docs: Add an actions overview

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Add an introduction chapter explaining actions
in detail. Most of this content is taken from
the GAction HowDoI page.
This commit is contained in:
Matthias Clasen 2019-05-03 04:58:46 +00:00
parent 65697e3324
commit 29bafd1e15
3 changed files with 377 additions and 1 deletions
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<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE refentry PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.3//EN"
"http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.3/docbookx.dtd" [
]>
<refentry id="chap-actions">
<refmeta>
<refentrytitle>The GTK Action Model</refentrytitle>
<manvolnum>3</manvolnum>
<refmiscinfo>GTK Library</refmiscinfo>
</refmeta>
<refnamediv>
<refname>The GTK Action Model</refname>
<refpurpose>
How actions are used in GTK
</refpurpose>
</refnamediv>
<refsect1 id="actions-overview">
<title>Overview of actions in GTK</title>
<para>
This chapter describes in detail how GTK uses actions to connect
activatable UI elements to callbacks. GTK inherits the underlying
architecture of GAction and GMenu for describing abstract actions
and menus from the GIO library.
</para>
<refsect2>
<title>Basics about actions</title>
<para>
A GAction is essentially a way to tell the toolkit about a
piece of functionality in your program, and to give it a name.
</para>
<para>
Actions are purely functional. They do not contain any
presentational information.
</para>
<para>
An action has four pieces of information associated with it:
<itemizedlist>
<listitem><para>
a name as an identifier (usually all-lowercase, untranslated
English string)
</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>
an enabled flag indicating if the action can be activated or
not (like the "sensitive" property on widgets)
</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>
an optional state value, for stateful actions (like a boolean
for toggles)
</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>
an optional parameter type, used when activating the action
</para></listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</para>
<para>
An action supports two operations. You can activate it, which
requires passing a parameter of the correct type
And you can request to change the actions state (for stateful
actions) to a new state value of the correct type.
</para>
<para>
Here are some rules about an action:
<itemizedlist>
<listitem><para>
the name is immutable (in the sense that it will never
change) and it is never %NULL
</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>
the enabled flag can change
</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>
the parameter type is immutable
</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>
the parameter type is optional: it can be %NULL
</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>
if the parameter type is %NULL then action activation must
be done without a parameter (ie: a %NULL GVariant pointer)
</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>
if the parameter type is non-%NULL then the parameter must
have this type
</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>
the state can change, but it cannot change type
</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>
if the action was stateful when it was created, it will
always have a state and it will always have exactly the same
type (such as boolean or string)
</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>
if the action was stateless when it was created, it can never
have a state
</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>
you can only request state changes on stateful actions and it
is only possible to request that the state change to a value
of the same type as the existing state
</para></listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</para>
<para>
An action does not have any sort of presentational information
such as a label, an icon or a way of creating a widget from it.
</para>
</refsect2>
<refsect2>
<title>Action state and parameters</title>
<para>
Most actions in your application will be stateless actions with
no parameters. These typically appear as menu items with no
special decoration. An example is "quit".
</para>
<para>
Stateful actions are used to represent an action which has a
closely-associated state of some kind. A good example is a
"fullscreen" action. For this case, you'd expect to see a
checkmark next to the menu item when the fullscreen option
is active. This is usually called a toggle action, and it has
a boolean state. By convention, toggle actions have no parameter
type for activation: activating the action always toggles the
state.
</para>
<para>
Another common case is to have an action representing a
enumeration of possible values of a given type (typically
string). This is often called a radio action and is usually
represented in the user interface with radio buttons or radio
menu items, or sometimes a combobox. A good example is
"text-justify" with possible values "left", "center", and
"right". By convention, these types of actions have a parameter
type equal to their state type, and activating them with a
particular parameter value is equivalent to changing their
state to that value.
</para>
<para>
This approach to handling radio buttons is different than many
other action systems such as GtkAction. With GAction, there is
only one action for "text-justify" and "left", "center" and
"right" are possible states on that action. There are not three
separate "justify-left", "justify-center" and "justify-right"
actions.
</para>
<para>
The final common type of action is a stateless action with a
parameter. This is typically used for actions like
"open-bookmark" where the parameter to the action would be
the identifier of the bookmark to open.
</para>
<para>
Because some types of actions cannot be invoked without a
parameter, it is often important to specify a parameter when
referring to the action from a place where it will be invoked
(such as from a radio button that sets the state to a particular
value or from a menu item that opens a specific bookmark). In
these contexts, the value used for the action parameter is
typically called the target of the action.
</para>
<para>
Even though toggle actions have a state, they do not have a
parameter. Therefore, a target value is not needed when
referring to them — they will always be toggled on activation.
</para>
<para>
Most APIs that allow using a GAction (such as GMenuModel and
GtkActionable) allow use of detailed action names. This is a
convenient way of specifying an action name and an action target
with a single string.
</para>
<para>
In the case that the action target is a string with no unusual
characters (ie: only alpha-numeric, plus '-' and '.') then you
can use a detailed action name of the form "justify::left" to
specify the justify action with a target of left.
</para>
<para>
In the case that the action target is not a string, or contains
unusual characters, you can use the more general format
"action-name(5)", where the "5" here is any valid text-format
GVariant (ie: a string that can be parsed by g_variant_parse()).
Another example is "open-bookmark('http://gnome.org/')".
</para>
<para>
You can convert between detailed action names and split-out
action names and target values using g_action_parse_detailed_action_name()
and g_action_print_detailed_action_name() but usually you will
not need to. Most APIs will provide both ways of specifying
actions with targets.
</para>
</refsect2>
<refsect2>
<title>Action scopes</title>
<para>
Actions are always scoped to a particular object on which they
operate.
</para>
<para>
In GTK, actions are typically scoped to either an application
or a window, but any widget can have actions associated with it.
</para>
<para>
Actions scoped to windows should be the actions that
specifically impact that window. These are actions like
"fullscreen" and "close", or in the case that a window contains
a document, "save" and "print".
</para>
<para>
Actions that impact the application as a whole rather than one
specific window are scoped to the application. These are actions
like "about" and "preferences".
</para>
<para>
If a particular action is scoped to a window then it is scoped
to a specific window. Another way of saying this: if your
application has a "fullscreen" action that applies to windows
and it has three windows, then it will have three fullscreen
actions: one for each window.
</para>
<para>
Having a separate action per-window allows for each window to
have a separate state for each instance of the action as well
as being able to control the enabled state of the action on a
per-window basis.
</para>
<para>
Actions are added to their relevant scope (application or
window) either using the GActionMap interface, or by using
gtk_widget_insert_action_group().
</para>
</refsect2>
<refsect2>
<title>Action groups and action maps</title>
<para>
Actions rarely occurs in isolation. It is common to have groups
of related actions, which are represented by instances of the
GActionGroup interface.
</para>
<para>
Action maps are a variant of action groups that allow to change
the name of the action as it is looked up. In GTK, the convention
is to add a prefix to the action name to indicate the scope of
the actions, such as "app." for the actions with application scope
or "win." for those with window scope.
</para>
<para>
When referring to actions on a GActionMap only the name of the
action itself is used (ie: "quit", not "app.quit"). The
"app.quit" form is only used when referring to actions from
places like a GMenu or GtkActionable widget where the scope
of the action is not already known.
</para>
<para>
GtkApplication and GtkApplicationWindow implement the GActionMap
interface, so you can just add actions directly to them. For
other widgets, use gtk_widget_insert_action_group() to add
actions to it.
</para>
<para>
If you want to insert several actions at the same time, it is
typically faster and easier to use GActionEntry.
</para>
</refsect2>
<refsect2>
<title>Connecting actions to widgets</title>
<para>
Any widget that implements the GtkActionable interface can
be connected to an action just by setting the ::action-name
property. If the action has a parameter, you will also need
to set the ::action-target property.
Widgets that implement GtkAction include GtkSwitch, GtkButton,
GtkMenuItem and their respective subclasses.
</para>
<para>
Another of obtaining widgets that are connected to actions is
to create a menu using a GMenu menu model. GMenu provides an
abstract way to describe typical menus: nested groups of items
where each item can have a label, and icon, and an action.
</para>
<para>
Typical uses of GMenu inside GTK are to set up an application
menu or menubar with gtk_appication_set_app_menu() or
gtk_application_set_menubar(). Another, maybe more common use
is to create a popover for a menubutton, using
gtk_menu_button_set_menu_model().
</para>
<para>
Unlike traditional menus, those created from menu models don't
have keyboard accelerators associated with menu items. Instead,
GtkApplication offers the gtk_application_set_accels_for_action()
API to associate keyboard shortcuts with actions.
</para>
</refsect2>
<refsect2>
<title>Activation</title>
<para>
When a widget with a connected action is activated, GTK finds
the action to activate by walking up the widget hierarchy,
looking for a matching action, ending up at the GtkApplication.
</para>
</refsect2>
<refsect2>
<title>Built-in Actions</title>
<para>
GTK uses actions for its own purposes in a number places. These
built-in actions can sometimes be activated by applications, and
you should avoid naming conflicts with them when creating your
own actions.
<variablelist>
<varlistentry>
<term>default.activate</term>
<listitem><para>Activates the default widget in a context
(typically a GtkWindow, GtkDialog or GtkPopover)
</para></listitem>
</varlistentry>
</variablelist>
</para>
</refsect2>
</refsect1>
</refentry>

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@ -24,8 +24,9 @@
<xi:include href="xml/getting_started.xml"/>
<xi:include href="resources.sgml" />
<xi:include href="xml/question_index.sgml" />
<xi:include href="drawing-model.xml" />
<xi:include href="xml/drawing-model.xml" />
<xi:include href="xml/input-handling.xml" />
<xi:include href="xml/actions.xml" />
</part>
<part id="gtkobjects">

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]
content_files = [
'actions.xml',
'broadway.xml',
'building.sgml',
'compiling.sgml',
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]
expand_content_files = [
'actions.xml',
'compiling.sgml',
'drawing-model.xml',
'glossary.xml',