Home/ Questions/Q 797909
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-14T22:53:06+00:00

I would like to parse the menu structure for Gnome Panels (the standard Gnome

  • 0

I would like to parse the menu structure for Gnome Panels (the standard Gnome Desktop application launcher) and it’s KDE equivalent using c/c++ function calls. That is, I’d like a list of what the base menu categories and submenu are installed in a given machine. I would like to do with using fairly simple c/c++ function calls (with NO shelling out please).

I understand that these menus are in the standard xdg format.
I understand that this menu structure is stored in xml files such as:

/home/user/.config/menus/applications.menu

I’ve looked here: http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/menu-spec?action=show&redirect=Standards%2Fmenu-spec but all they offer is the standard and some shell files to insert item entries (I don’t want shell scripts, I don’t want installation, I definitely don’t want to create a c-library from the XDG specification. I want to find the existing menu structure). I’ve looked here: http://library.gnome.org/admin/system-admin-guide/stable/menustructure-13.html.en for more notes on these structures. None of this gives me a good idea of how determine the menu structures using a c/c++ program.

The actual gnome menu structures seem to be a horrifically hairy things – they don’t seem to show the menu structure but to give an XML-coded description of all the changes that the menus have gone through since installation. I assume gnome panels parses these file so there’s a function buried somewhere to do this but I’ve yet to find where that function is after scanning library.gnome.org for a couple of days. I’ve scanned the Nautilus source code as well but Panels seem to exist elsewhere or are burried well.

Thanks in advance

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    After much painful research… it seems the most stable approach is to take the gnome menu parsing code, rip it of the tar ball and use it locally.

    The version I used is here:
    http://download.gnome.org/sources/gnome-menus/2.28/gnome-menus-2.28.0.1.tar.gz

    This code loudly proclaims that it shouldn’t treated as any kind of API so one is forced to, as I said rip it of the gnome tree and keep a local copy for one’s own application (gather than dynamically linking to a library).

    The KDE version of the menu-parsing code seems like it could be used more transportably but actually depends heavily on KDE’s virtual file system. As far as I can tell, the code gnome works stand-alone. The test-file can serve as a template for doing your own parsing.

    • 0