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Boxes' hardening sprint: two weeks in

Finishing my 4th year of CS studies

I spent the last two weeks working hard on the report and the presentation of the project my colleagues and I worked on all the semester long: creating the Stibbons multi-agent system programming language and development environment.

I am very proud of what we accomplished and I’ll probably present it to you in the upcoming weeks. =)

Planning the port of Boxes' installation wizard to GtkAssistant

All this work unfortunately let me little time to work on Boxes, but I nonetheless took some time to look at how its installation wizard is implemented and planned how to port it to GtkAssistant.

Boxes' installation wizard

Currently, the wizard is ordered that way:

  • WizardWindow
    • WizardToolbar: the toolbar containing the navigation buttons
    • Wizard: the stack of pages

Most of the wizard’s intelligence seems to lie in Wizard and its pages, I’ll have to dig further into Boxes' code in order to fully understand how the wizard work.

GtkAssistant

A GtkAssistant is a window which allow a developer to guide the end users through complex configuration processes by splitting them into several steps represented by pages that can be completed.

GtkAssistant’s API is pretty simple, you can:

  • add or remove pages to the assistant
  • navigate through them
  • set the title of a page
  • set the type of a page
  • set whether a page has been completed or not

If a page has been completed, the toolbar allow the end user to move to the next page, except if it is the last page in which case it will allow him to complete the whole configuration process.

The plan

Despite a similar behaviour from the end user’s perspective, the wizard’s behaviour differ significantly from the one of GtkAssistant. Some tailoring will be required to make them match.

To smoothly pass from the current wizard to a new one using GtkAssistant, I plan to follow these steps:

  • implement one by one the needed components (understand “logical sets of public methods”) of GtkAssistant into WizardWindow:
    • setting and getting the current page
    • setting and getting a page’s title
    • setting and getting whether a page have been completed or not
    • …
  • once all the necessary components have been implemented, make WizardWindow inherit from GtkAssistant and remove the custom method implementations
  • remove the now unneeded WizardToolbar and Wizard classes.

Hopefully, next week will be enough to implement such a change!

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