How to use GListStore in .ui file (xml)?

[yookoala (Koala Yeung)]

I’m writing a Gtk4 application that has a GtkDropDown. I need to populate it with items of label-value pairs. And I think I need to use GListStore for the purpose.

In Gtk3, a similar class GtkListStore was available.

  <object class="GtkListStore" id="version_store">
    <columns>
      <column type="gint"/>
      <column type="gchararray"/>
    </columns>
    <data>
      <row>
        <col id="0">3</col>
        <col id="1" translatable="yes">Standard (Version 3)</col>
      </row>
      <row>
        <col id="0">5</col>
        <col id="1" translatable="yes">Updated (Version 5)</col>
      </row>
    </data>
  </object>

This class is now deprecated.

From what I read, GListStore accepts only GType in constructor. Instead of declare the column types in GtkListStore, now I should:

1. Declare a GType (with an gint value and a gchararray for label); then
2. Declare a GListStore with item-type set to this new GType; then
3. Declare a GtkDropDown to use the GListStore as model.

My code is written in Python. And neither of the above steps are known to me. Especially step (1). I found previous answer of how to do this in C code. But I cannot find any example how to do this either in .ui (xml) or Python.

Please advice how I should do this. Or at least where I can find relevant documentation / manual / tutorial. Thanks a lot.

[yookoala (Koala Yeung)]

Since I’m a new user. I can only create post with 3 links.

But this is the Discourse answer I found with C code.

How to use GListStore

You can only use GObject as the data inside a store. If your old GtkListStore used multiple columns, the appropriate way to migrate to GListStore and to the new list view widgets in GTK4, is to create an object that represents the row data, with properties representing the state and data of the row. For instance, something like: enum { COL_NAME, COL_SURNAME, COL_AGE, COL_ADDRESS, N_COLUMNS }; GtkListStore *people_model = gtk_list_store_new (N_COLUMNS, G_TYPE_STRING, /…

[gwillems]

Hi,

As far as I know, GListStore are not buildable from *.ui files.

An easy way to do is to use a special GtkStringList, which is buildable, but you can only specify the strings:

<object class="GtkDropDown">
  <property name="model">
    <object class="GtkStringList">
      <items>
        <item>Option 1</item>
        <item>Option 2</item>
        <item>Something else</item>
      </items>
    </object>
  </property>
</object>

Then, on Python side, define some dict or list to map the string to its value.

The hard way is what you described above: create a custom type, then a custom liststore, then a custom factory to generate the strings to display. But I think it’s overkill here.