Hide navigation sidebar
Hide table of contents sidebar
Skip to content
Back to top
View this page
Toggle table of contents sidebar

# Expressions

Expressions make your user interface code reactive. This means when your application’s data changes, the user interface reacts to the change automatically.

    label: bind MyAppWindow.account.username;
    /*     ^               ^       ^
           |               creates lookup expressions that are re-evaluated when
           |               the account's username *or* the account itself changes
           |
           binds the `label` property to the expression's output
     */

When a value is bound to an expression using the `bind` keyword, the binding monitors all the object properties that are inputs to the expression, and reevaluates it if any of them change.

This is a powerful tool for ensuring consistency and simplifying your code. Rather than pushing changes to the user interface wherever they may occur, you can define your data model with GObject and let GTK take care of the rest.

## Expressions

Expression = ( ClosureExpression | Literal | ( ‘(’ Expression ‘)’ ) ) ( LookupExpression | CastExpression )*

Note

The grammar above is designed to eliminate left recursion, which can make parsing more complex. In this format, an expression consists of a prefix (such as a literal value or closure invocation) followed by zero or more infix or suffix operators.

Expressions are composed of property lookups and/or closures. Property lookups are the inputs to the expression, and closures provided in application code can perform additional calculations on those inputs.

## Lookup Expressions

LookupExpression = ‘.’ <property:IDENT>

Lookup expressions perform a GObject property lookup on the preceding expression. They are recalculated whenever the property changes, using the notify signal

The type of a property expression is the type of the property it refers to.

## Closure Expressions

ClosureExpression = ‘$’ <name:IDENT> ‘(’ ( Expression ),* ‘)’

Closure expressions allow you to perform additional calculations that aren’t supported in blueprint by writing those calculations as application code. These application-defined functions are created in the same way as signal handlers.

Expressions are only reevaluated when their inputs change. Because blueprint doesn’t manage a closure’s application code, it can’t tell what changes might affect the result. Therefore, closures must be pure, or deterministic. They may only calculate the result based on their immediate inputs, properties of their inputs or outside variables.

Blueprint doesn’t know the closure’s return type, so closure expressions must be cast to the correct return type using a cast expression.

## Cast Expressions

CastExpression = ‘as’ ‘<’ TypeName ‘>’

Cast expressions allow Blueprint to know the type of an expression when it can’t otherwise determine it.

    // Cast the result of the closure so blueprint knows it's a string
    label: bind $my_closure() as <string>