Idea: KAction based dialogs

[dirk.schoenberger at sz-online.de]

Hi,

Currently, in order to develop your dialog classes for a KDE application,
you have two possibilities:

- you could use the KDE framework (use e.g. subclass from KDialogBase) and
implement your dialog GUI manually
- you could use the Qt UI designer, where you can design your UI
graphically, in order to use it, you create source code from it.
Theoretically it should be possible to load the UI at runtime, but this is
not quite easily to accomplish. Furtheron, if you use Qt designer, there
are some problems because you don't easily get dialogs which feel "native"
to KDE (use KDE components, and the like)

So I would like to propose another way to implement dialogs classes.
Implement your GUI as a set of actions, which interact with each other,
like in the recommended implementation for forms (main windows). Define
the actual GUI layout in an external resource file, which is load and
evaluated at runtime. If you use the XMLGUI framework for it, you can get
the other features of this framework, too, like multiple versions of the
dialog, possible merging of sub documents, etc.

I have a working "proof of concept" implementtation, which currently
renders XML dialog descriptions like these attached.

Is there any interest in having such functionality (in single applications
or KDE as a whole)?

Comments, ideas, discussion etc welcome

Regards
Dirk

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