GTK+ By Example/Tree View

This chapter has been based on this work [1]

Chapter Sections

1. Lists and Trees: the GtkTreeView Widget
2. Components: Model, Renderer, Column, View
3. GtkTreeModels for Data Storage: GtkListStore and GtkTreeStore
4. Creating a Tree View
5. Mapping Data to the Screen: GtkTreeViewColumn and GtkCellRenderer
6. Selections, Double-Clicks and Context Menus
7. Sorting
8. Editable Cells
9. Miscellaneous
10. Drag'n'Drop (DnD) **** needs revision ***
11. Writing Custom Models
12. Writing Custom Cell Renderers
13. Other Resources

Original License (Tree View)

Copyright (c) 2003-2004 Tim-Philipp Müller <tim at centricular dot net>

This tutorial may be redistributed and modified freely in any form, as long as all authors are given due credit for their work and all non-trivial changes by third parties are clearly marked as such either within the document (e.g. in a revision history), or at an external and publicly accessible place that is referred to in the document (such as a CVS/SVN/git repository).

Original Version Credits

Thanks to Axel C. for proof-reading the first drafts, for many suggestions, and for introducing me to the tree view widget in the first place (back then when I was still convinced that porting to Gtk+-2.x was unnecessary, Gtk+-1.2 applications looked nice, and Aristotle had already said everything about politics that needs to be said).

1. Harring Figueiredo shed some light on how GtkListStore and GtkTreeStore deal with pixbufs.
2. Ken Rastatter suggested some additional topics (with complete references even).
3. Both Andrej Prsa and Alan B. Canon sent me a couple of suggestions, and 'taf2', Massimo Mangoni and others spotted some typos.
4. Many thanks to all of them, and of course also to kris and everyone else in #gtk+.

Original Revision History

14.3. Revision History

5th January 2008

• Update some broken links; remove references to external cell renderers that have been obsoleted by Gtk adding such renderers.

5th June 2005

• Remove unnecessary col = gtk_tree_view_column_new() im hello world code (leftover from migration to convenience functions).

3rd February 2005

• Point out that GObjects such as GdkPixbufs retrieved with gtk_tree_model_get() need to be g_object_unref()'ed after use, as gtk_tree_model_get() adds a reference.
• Added explicit (gint) event->x double to int conversion to code snippet using gtk_tree_view_get_path_at_pos() to avoid compiler warnings.

9th September 2004

• Fixed another mistake in tree path explanation: text did not correspond picture (s/movie clips/movie trailers/); (thanks to Benjamin Brandt for spotting it).

6th August 2004

• Fixed mistake in tree path explanation (s/4th/5th/) (thanks to both Andrew Kirillov and Benjamin Brandt for spotting it).

30th April 2004

• Added Hello World

31st March 2004

• Fixed fatal typo in custom list code: g_assert() in custom_list_init() should be ==, not != (spotted by mmc).
• Added link to Owen Taylor's mail on the GtkTreeView Drag'n'Drop API.

24th January 2004

• Fixed typo in code example (remove n-th row example) (Thanks to roel for spotting it).
• Changed 'Context menus' section title

19th January 2004

• Expanded section on GtkTreeRowReferences, and on removing multiple rows.

8th January 2004

• Added tiny section on Glade and treeviews
• Added more detail to the section describing GtkTreePath, GtkTreeIter et al.
• Reformatted document structure: instead of one single chapter with lots of sections, have multiple chapters (this tutorial is way to big to become part of the Gtk+ tutorial anyway); enumerate chapters and sections.
• Expanded the section on tree view columns and cell renderers, with help of two diagrams by Owen Taylor (from the GUADEC 2003 Gtk+ tutorial slides).

10th December 2003

• Added more information about how to remove a single row, or more specifically, the n-th row of a list store
• Added a short example about how to pack icons into the tree view.

28th October 2003

• Editable cells will work fine even if selection is set to GTK_SELECTION_NONE. Removed sentences that say otherwise.

23rd October 2003

• fix 'jumpy' selections in custom model GtkTreeSortable interface implementation. gtk_tree_model_rows_reordered() does not seem to work like the API reference implies (see bug #124790)
• added section about how to get the cell renderer a button click happened on
• added section about editable cells with spin buttons (and a CellRendererSpin implementation to the examples)

10th October 2003

• make custom model GtkTreeSortable implementation emit "sort-column-changed" signal when sortid is changed
• fixed code typo in selection function section; added a paragraph about rule hint to 'make whole row coloured or bold' section

7th October 2003

• Reformatted source code to make it fit on pages when generating ps/pdf output
• Added link to PDF and docbook XML versions.