How to determine visible region of a Windows in X Windows / Linux?

Question

I have several nested X Windows - let's say - a scrollable window within a scrollable window (see the example below). In such case the main window contains (at least) the major scroll bars and the (major) drawing area they control. This drawing area on its turn contains (at least) a scrollable window batch - a (minor) main window, containing a scrollbars and minor drawing area.

During live scrolling of inner drawing area the redraw procedure messes up, because I am using the XCopyArea to speed the process and move the contents that are valid and invoke the actual redraw routine for just the newly appeared content. This works fine when the inner drawing batch is by itself, but when nested within another one a problem occurs - when the inner scrolling-batck is partially visible (i.e. the major drawing area is scrolled) redrawing of newly appeared contents is clipped from the major drawing area and never actually redrawn, but considered to be so. When on the next scroll XCopyArea gets this supposedly-redrawn area it is actually empty. Finally this empty area show up on the partially visible inner scrolling-batch and it is empty. On the first general redraw message they are fixed.

If I can obtain the clipping mask for what is actually visible from (my) inner drawing area I can adjust the XCopyArea() call and redraw call and overcome the problem without the plan "B" which is redrawing all contents on each scrollbar movement.

Example: Developing a plugin for Mozilla and needing to determine the region that describes the visible area of "my" window, i.e. the one that is passed from the Mozilla system as plugin viewport.

Answer 1

If its really an X Window you get, and not a widget from some specific toolkit (like GTK+ maybe?) then you can use the XGetWindowAttributes function call.

This fills out a provided XWindowAttributes structure, which includes integers for the x and y position of the window as well as its width and height and other useful facts.

But in reality I think you are probably using the Mozilla plugin API inherited from Netscape, aka NSAPI, and in that case what you get is a call to your function NPP_SetWindow() at least once (and again if necessary because something changed) with a structure which contains the information you're looking for. Try looking at http://www.mozilla.org/projects/plugins/ for more information about the APIs you should use.