Organization of the Abaqus GUI Toolkit User's Guide

This guide is organized by functionality and is designed to guide developers through the process of writing an application by explaining how to use the components of the toolkit and by providing snippets of example code. A separate Abaqus GUI Toolkit Reference Guide that contains an alphabetical listing of all of the toolkit calls is provided.

The Abaqus GUI Toolkit is based on the FOX GUI toolkit. While this guide explains some of the basic concepts of the FOX toolkit, it does not provide details for many other aspects of the FOX toolkit. For more details on the FOX GUI toolkit, refer to the FOX web site (http://www.fox-toolkit.org).

This guide consists of the following sections:

Widgets

This section describes some of the most commonly used widgets in the Abaqus GUI Toolkit.

Layout managers

This section describes how to use the various layout managers in the Abaqus GUI Toolkit to arrange widgets in a dialog box.

Dialog boxes

This section describes the dialog boxes that you can create using the Abaqus GUI Toolkit.

Commands

In an application that employs a graphical user interface, the interface must collect input from the user and communicate that input to the application. In addition, the graphical user interface must keep its state up-to-date based on the state of the application. This section describes how those tasks are accomplished using the Abaqus GUI Toolkit and the two types of commands in Abaqus/CAE—kernel commands and GUI commands.

Modes

A mode is a mechanism for gathering input from the user, processing that input, and then issuing a command to the kernel. This section describes the modes that are available in the Abaqus GUI Toolkit.

Creating a GUI module

This section describes how you can create a GUI module.

Creating a GUI toolset

This section describes how you can create a GUI toolset.

Customizing an existing module or toolset

The previous sections describe how you can create a new module or toolset. Alternatively, the Abaqus GUI Toolkit allows you to derive a new module or toolset from an existing module or toolset and to add or remove functionality from it.

Creating an application

This section explains how to create an application, such as Abaqus/CAE. It also describes the high-level infrastructure that is responsible for running the application.

The application object

This section describes the Abaqus application object. The application object manages the message queue, timers, chores, GUI updating, and other system facilities.

The main window

This section describes the layout, components, and behavior of the Abaqus main window.

Customizing the main window

The main window base class provides the GUI infrastructure to allow user interaction, the manipulation of modules, and the display of objects in the viewport. This section describes how you add functionality to an application by deriving from the main window base class and then registering modules and toolsets.