Configuring Subwidget Options Using the <tt>-options</tt> Switch<A NAME=135> </A>

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### Configuring Subwidget Options Using the `-options` Switch

As we have seen above, we can use commands like ```subwidget` name `configure ...`'' to set the configuration options of subwidgets. However, this can get quite tedious if we want to configure many options of many subwidgets.

There is a more convenient and terse way to configure the subwidget options without using the `subwidget` method: the `-options` switch. All Tix mega-widgets support the `-option` switch, which can be used during the creation of the mega-widget.

> `tixControl .income -label "Income: " -variable income -options {
> label.width 8
> label.anchor e
> entry.width 10
> entry.borderWidth 3
> }
> tixControl .age -label "Age: " -variable age -options {
> label.width 8
> label.anchor e
> entry.width 10
> entry.borderWidth 3
> }
> pack .income .age -side top`

(Figure 1-5) Using the `-options` switch

> (Figure 1-6) Using the `-options` Switch to Align the Labels

The use of the `-options` switch is illustrated in program 1-5, which creates two TixControl widgets for the user to enter his income and age. Because of the different sizes of the labels of these two widgets, if we create them haphazardly, the output may look like fig 1-6.

To avoid this problem, we set the width of the `label` subwidgets of the `.income` and `.age` widgets to be the same (8 characters wide) and set their `-anchor` option to `e` (flushed to right), so that the labels appear to be well-aligned. Program 1-5 also does other things such as setting the `entry` subwidgets to have a width of 10 characters and a border-width of 3 pixels so that they appear wider and ``deeper''. A better result is shown in figure 1-6.

As we can see from program 1-5, the value for the `-options` switch is a list of one or more pairs of

> subwidget-option-spec value ..

subwidget-option-spec is in the form subwidget-name`.`option-name. For example, `label.anchor` identifies the `anchor` option of the `label` subwidget, `entry.width` identifies the `width` option of the entry subwidget, and so on.

Notice we must use the name of the option, not the command-line switch of the option. For example, the option that specifies the border-width of the `entry` subwidget has the command-line switch `-borderwidth` but its name is `borderWidth` (notice the capitalization on the name but not on the command-line switch). Therefore, we have used the capitalized version of ```entry.borderWidth 3`'' in program 1-5 and not ```entry.borderwidth 3`''. To find out the names of the options of the respective subwidgets, please refer to their manual pages.