Data Driven GUI Construction

High Maintenance:

Drive GUI creation from lists included in code or external data files.

Example: Creating a menu of files to process

set fileList [list a.dat b.dat c.dat d.dat]

foreach file $fileList {
  $fileMenu add command -label "$file" -command "ProcessFile $file"
  }

Advantage:

• Single point of change to add new files.

Disadvantage:

• Code must be modified to add new files.

Drive the creation of menus from the raw data, instead of a manually created list.

Example: Creating a menu of files to process

set fileList [glob $stateArray(BASEDIR)/*.dat]

foreach file $fileList {
  $fileMenu add command -label "$file" -command "ProcessFile $file"
  }

Advantage:

• New files automatically appear in menu.

Disadvantage:

• May need a second set of processing to order data properly.

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