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Dime

Dialogs Made Easy

NOTE: Dime has been replaced by Adime

Adime is the same library as Dime but a newer version.

The reason why I had to change the name of the library from Dime to Adime is that there is another library called Dime (which is bigger and has been around longer) so it caused a conflict. The document describing how to move from Dime to Adime is also in the latest release of Adime.

Introduction

Dime, version 1.2.4, 15 december 2001
Dime is a portable add-on library for Allegro with functions for generating Allegro dialogs in a very simple way. Its main purpose is to give as easy an API as possible to people who want dialogs for editing many kinds of input data.

It currently works with Linux, DJGPP, MinGW32, MSVC and Watcom. Help with porting to generic Unix and BeOS would be very appreciated!

The sourceforge project page is at http://sourceforge.net/projects/dime/

Licence

The ZLIB/LIBPNG licence.

Download

Source of Dime 1.2.4 (166 kB)

This is, like Allegro, a source only distribution, so you will have to build it after unzipping the archive. Installation instructions can be found in readme.txt. Requires Allegro version 3.9.38 or later, and compiles under Linux, DJGPP, MinGW32, MSVC and Watcom.

The WIP page
The Work In Progress version is unstable (don't use except for testing!) but contains new features.

Help in Windows format (25 kB)
All the help compiled into windows help format, provided by Mike Greubel. This is from version 1.2.1b so it is (slightly) outdated.

You can also get old versions of Dime.

Detailed Features

Only one function call to create a whole dialog, using a format string.
3d look and feel.
No need to calculate object coordinates by hand. All such things are handled completely automatically.
Uses Allegro's gui in the bottom, so it supports Unicode and is potentially portable to any system supported by Allegro (though I have not created makefiles for all).
The format string supports the following kinds of input:
- Text input.
- Number input, supporting double, float and signed or unsigned char, short and int. Thanks to the expression evaluator for Egg (written by Shawn Hargreaves), it has a built-in calculator so that the user can enter mathematical expressions.
- Selection of a filename, using Allegro's file selector.
- Boolean input, using a checkbox.
- Selection of a string from a list box.
- A new dialog recursively opened when the user clicks a button.
Highly customizable look, using global variables for the fonts, colors and measurements of the dialogs.
The kernel is flexible enough to allow you to register your own format strings at runtime.
3d versions of the following Allegro gui functions: d_edit_proc(), d_list_proc(), d_button_proc(), d_check_proc() and d_text_list_proc(). Gui functions for edit boxes with mathematical expressions and a multi-line version of d_text_proc().
The format string is carefully checked for any possible errors, thus minimizing the risk for you to make mistakes.
Help compiles into txt, info, man, html and rtf formats.
Two example programs.

Screenshot

Here is a typical example of what a dialog can look like:

Screenshot

This dialog was generated with the single function call:

   dialogf("dialogf() example",
           ALIGN_CENTRE, ALIGN_CENTRE, 200,
           "Required Information%line[]"
           "Name:%string[256]"
           "Age:%int[0,140]"
           "Married:%bool[]"
           "Optional Information%line[]"
           "Shoe size (Swedish units):%float[10,60]"
           "Favourite text file:%filename[256,txt,Select a text file]"
           "Language:%list[,English;Lojban;Swahili;Swedish]",
           name, &age, &married, &shoe_size, &filename, &language_index);

Documentation

This is the documentation from the zip.
Readme - Installation instructions and some more.
Changes - Differences between versions.
Thanks - People who have contributed.
API Reference - How to use Dime.
How The Expressions Work - Description of the syntax in the expression evaluator, written by Shawn Hargreaves.
Internal API Reference - Some inner workings that you only need to know if you want to extend Dime.
Wish List - Things that would be nice to have.

By Sven Sandberg, svens@it.uu.se.
Last updated on 12 December 2002.