Layouts with drawables, bitmaps and text - That's all? I need dynamic subviews

As I said before, maybe look at a few open sourced things (there's a sticky here with PeterD's page) and see how others do it in CIQ.

I can understand your frustration, but also understand there are thousands of apps in the store that have things similar to what you are trying to do, and there is a bit of a learning curve.

That exactly what I wanted to avoid. The whole idea of subviews (or: custom drawables) is their local coordinate system, so you can place them anywhere without changing code.

I found that I could use the <drawable id="mySubviewId" class="MyModule.MyClassName"> tag, but then there's no way to add x, y, width and height, as the DTD doesn't allow that. So how am I supposed to place these drawables in the view?

You can do that. Here is sample code.

In your layout:

<layout id="Layout">
<label id="datetLabel" x="center" y="11" font="Gfx.FONT_SMALL" justification="Gfx.TEXT_JUSTIFY_CENTER" />
<drawable class="Clock">
<param name="locX">118</param>
<param name="locY">114</param>
<param name="color">Gfx.COLOR_WHITE</param>
</drawable>
</layout>


In your drawable Clock.mc

class Clock extends Ui.Drawable {
var Color;

function initialize(dictionary) {
dictionary.put(:identifier, "Clock");
Drawable.initialize(dictionary);
Color = dictionary[:Color;
}

function draw(dc) {
dc.setColor(Color, Color);
dc.drawText(locX, locY, Gfx.FONT_SMALL, "12:00", Gfx.TEXT_JUSTIFY_CENTER);
}
}


Note that locX and locY by default is available within your class.
For arbitrary parameters you have to add them to the dictionary in your initialize method.

Thanks for the XML layout hints. I'll check that out. Hope it also works for width and height parameters.

Yes, IQ has a learning curve. I'm now at 3 apps and 2 barrels. I'm used to coding 3,000+ classes projects. Definitely not a newbie to software engineering and language design. I now ended up implementing a TranslatedDeviceContext that does the offsetting and clipping. It's not pretty, because that translated DC needs to be setup manually, but it keeps me going for now.

I suggest Garmin fix DeviceContext for translation & clipping natively, though.