From: Alex Shulgin <alex.shulgin@...>
Date: 2008-03-26T04:30:08+09:00
Subject: Re: optionparser to gui automation?

On Mar 24, 7:07 pm, Mark Noworolski <jma...@gmail.com> wrote:
> [Note:  parts of this message were removed to make it a legal post.]
>
> I'm looking to support functionality like follows:
>   1. You start a ruby program with commandline arguments (in a standard
> optionparser kind of way)...
>   2. If you do not provide any, a GUI pops up, asking you for things that
> would otherwise be on the commandline.
>   3. Ideally, this is automated with semi-sane defaults for the gui view.
>
> I would expect that there might be some sort of optionparser extension that
> might do this but googling has not helped me out so far...
>
> Does anybody know of anything like this?

Hi,

A while ago, I had been trying to do something similar, but not
exactly. :-)

I've looked at this at a different angle: let's say we have some
command-line utility with lots of options and we'd like to provide a
GUI.  My idea was that as we can simply map GUI elements into command
line parameters, we can have a parser to read parameters from command
line and fill the GUI.

I've implemented a bit of this for my gtk-fortune project back while.
You might be interested to check out these:

http://gtk-fortune.rubyforge.org/svn/trunk/
http://gtk-fortune.rubyforge.org/svn/trunk/cmdgui

The relevant code is only in the trunk as I think it's still not in a
shape for a release or separate project and I hadn't touched it in
quite a while...

Please note, that in my approach I assumed that GUI is hand-made, not
generated, as this allows for "rich" options dialogs like "disable
that input field if this checkbox is cleared", etc.  Nonetheless, it
should work with a generated GUI as well. ;-)

Also, I've used my own limited command-line parser--it should be
possible to replace it with some widely used one.

--
Regards,
Alex