And I’m not finished with the GtkTreeView. No I’m not. Moehaha!
I created this full sample that shows what I meant with custom treemodels and only allocating the model items behind visible rows. It includes an autotools environment and more or less good way of creating classes in C (except that I didn’t yet use GObject for MsgHeader nor MsgHeaderProxy, feel free to send me a diff).
This is a Subversion repository. Use “svn checkout” in front of the url after installing subversion.
It uses the “unref_node” method of the GtkTreeModelIface interface which gets triggered by gtk_tree_model_unref_node to unallocate the real subjects that aren’t visible in the view.
I noticed that it (it is the GtkTreeView stuff) sometimes “misses” rows that become invisible (if you scroll very fast). So I fear this unref_node method will need fixes and/or if you use it, you’ll need to also create a background thread/procedure that checks for leftovers. This sample shows how you can walk the entire treemodel and do things with only the unvisible ones. I know it’s ugly. IMHO the full demo isn’t, but regretfully doesn’t the unref_node stuff work perfectly.
Feel free to request SVN accounts and/or send diffs if you want to experiment.