Hi,

I'm looking for a way to build a spreadsheet-like layout in .ui script and I'm a bit stuck. (Basically I'm trying to build an own variant of the Render -> Pre-Flight Scene… window.)

I also looked at files in the install folders, but most .ui files there are in a binary format (is there a way to convert them, I wonder).

Any help would be appreciated
cheers

The ASCII versions of the files can be found in $HH/config/OldUIFiles.cpio.gz. You can extract them using gunzip and then hcpio.

eg.
hcpio -i -d -I OldUIFiles.cpio

Then look in Applications/Fuse13.0.507/FUSE_FileDepListApp.ui for example. While you can create such a layout, I'm not sure that anything useful can be done because the underlying UI widgets like trees are not exposed in the HDK.

Thanks a lot – I'm looking at it right now, and seeing a listTree and listSheet ui elements, which are indeed doesn't seem to be exposed.

I wouldn't need any tree widgets, only a listSheet equivalent, I guess (multi-list widget where each row is a string, with select/multiselect capability).

I didn't want to go for PyQt and such (I didn't want to depend on anything but what Houdini provides), but I guess I don't have much of a choice, do I?

Yes, go with pyside. Unfortunately, there is no way to build something useful with .ui script, until it gets some love from developers.
I wrapped some of the .ui gadgets in python, just for fun : link [bitbucket.org]