[R-gui] A GUI question

[James Wettenhall]

Hi,

On Tue, 6 Jul 2004, Feng,Yang [Ontario] wrote:
> I am wondering if I can design a window which contains drop down menu,
> error message and output window(text or plot) together.

Yes!  

Firstly, some menu discussion.  I'm not entirely clear 
what you mean by a "drop down menu".  I assume you mean 
something like a regular pull-down menu ("File", "Edit", "Help" 
etc.), rather than a drop-down combo-box (e.g. for selecting a 
previously visited URL in a web browser).

There are some basic menu examples 
at: 
http://bioinf.wehi.edu.au/~wettenhall/RTclTkExamples/
http://bioinf.wehi.edu.au/~wettenhall/RTclTkExamples/menus.html

Also, the demos which come with ActiveTcl provide nice examples 
of various types of menus and menu-buttons:   
http://www.ActiveState.com/Products/ActiveTcl/
See: 
demos/Tk/menu.tcl
demos/Tk/menubu.tcl

Whether you should actually install ActiveTcl (rather than just 
unzipping the tarball/zip-file and looking at the demos) 
depends on your operating system.  For Windows, ActiveTcl is 
the easiest Tcl/Tk distribution to install, but most Linux 
systems come with Tcl/Tk 8.3.x, so installing ActiveTcl 8.4.x 
can lead to conflicts.  But there's no harm in downloading 
it, unzipping it and looking at the demos.  (I won't get 
into MacOS X issues unless you reveal that to be your OS.)

> I am wondering if I can design a window which contains drop down menu,
> error message and output window(text or plot) together.

A good example of combining input and output on the same window 
is the example which comes with tkrplot (from CRAN):
library(tkrplot)
?tkrplot
# Paste the example into your R session.

There is a slider (input) and a graph (output) on the same 
window.

> I am wondering if I can design a window which contains drop down menu,
> error message and output window(text or plot) together.

Having an error message on the same window is a bit unusual.  
Normally an error message would appear in a message box.  
If you want, you can have a text label on your window, which 
can be modified dynamically to indicate whether an error has 
occurred.  See:
http://bioinf.wehi.edu.au/~wettenhall/RTclTkExamples/textlabels.html

Here are some screenshots of my R-Tcl/Tk applications:
http://bioinf.wehi.edu.au/limmaGUI/about.html
http://bioinf.wehi.edu.au/affylmGUI/about.html

(These use the Tcl/Tk extensions BWidget and Tktable.)

> I read the user menu for TCL/TK, seems it can only provide separate
> window for different purposes.

"user menu" ? I'm not sure what you are referring to here.  I 
think your assumption about separate windows being required for 
separate purposes is incorrect.  But of course, it takes a bit 
of work to code up a functioning Tcl/Tk window with lots of 
"different purposes".

Hope this helps,
James