TableList - an [incr Tcl] Table Widget based on the Tk Listbox
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This directory contains the Tcl/Tk/Itcl sources for a simple table
widget. The TableList widget is implemented entirely in tcl, so you
won't have to recompile anything in order to use it in your tcl
application.  It does however require the following environment:

	Tcl-7.3  (or newer...)
	Tk-3.6   (or newer...)
	Itcl-1.5 (doesn't work with itcl-1.3)
	Blt-1.7  (for busy window, blt_table used in Check and Choice classes)
	TclX     (for min, max, lassign, ...)

The TableList widget is based on the Tk Listbox widget and is mainly
designed for displaying the results of database selects and
information from files or other sources. It uses a scrollbar handler
to avoid long delays at startup when displaying large amounts of data
by only displaying the rows that are actually going to be visible.
This improves startup time at the cost of somewhat slower scrolling.

If performance is a problem, you can also consider keeping the table
data in C or C++ and making it available through a tcl command.  If
you do this, you could also define an itcl subclass of the TableWidget
that uses the new command rather than a tcl list for accessing the
table data. It is also not very difficult to define a subclass of
TableWidget that gets its data over the network via tclTCP or Tcl-DP.

To install, just copy the tcl files to a directory and append that
directory in your tcl "auto_path" variable. Don't forget to install the
bitmaps in a known location as well.

For a complete description of how to use the TableList widget, see the
man page in the ./doc directory.  For information on the other itcl
classes included in this distribution, see the comments in the sources
in ./library.  I hope to get around to documenting some of these
classes in the future.

Note that none of these itcl classes are "complete" - they only
contain the features that I have needed up until now. Feel free to
improve them and send me the results, so I can include them in a
future release.

Acknowledgments:
----------------

I developed the main part of the TableList widget as part of a project
at Siemens/Nixdorf AG in Munich. 

Thanks to Arnulf Wiedemann (Arnulf.Wiedemann.@mch.sni.de)
and Wolfgang Grosser (Wolfgang.Grosser@mch.sni.de) for thier ideas
and for letting me make this public domain.

The latest changes were made as part of a project at ESO (European
Southern Observatory: http://http.hq.eso.org/eso-homepage.html), where
we are using the TableList widget to display telescope proposal data
from a Sybase database.

Copyright:
----------

This is free software. See the Copyright file with this distribution
for details.

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Allan Brighton
Free-lance Software Engineer

E-mail: allan@piano.sta.sub.org (home)
or: (until end of March 95) abrighto@eso.org (work)

Ph: [+49] (0) 8094-1370
Zaissing 3 8019 Steinhoering, Germany (near Munich)
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