I was told that perl/tk is a nice perl gui but is very badly documented. Well I can confirm I was told correctly.

Most recently I had some trouble with Tk:TableMatrix which is very poorly documented. The biggest annoyance I had was that TableMatrix is not compatible with ActivePerl 811 the most recent version. I found on a non english site that TableMatrix is compatible with 809. And I found that answer after a few hours of trying to figure out why my script would not run.

I also found out that when the documentation says to pass 4 values to -bd to describe {left right top bottom} border they really mean a refence to an array with four variables.

So I hope the posting of the following code will help others with TableMatrix.

Sample Tk::TableMatrix Code

#!/usr/bin/perl

use Tk;
use Tk::TableMatrix::Spreadsheet;

$mw = MainWindow->new;
$mw->configure(-title=>’ID3 Tag Genre and Year Fixer’);
$mw->minsize(qw(500 200));
$menu = $mw->Frame()->pack(-side=>’top’,-fill=>’x’);
$menu_file = $menu->Menubutton(-text=>’File’,-tearoff=>’false’)->pack(-side=>’left’);
$menu_file->command(-label=>’Exit’,-command=>sub{$mw->destroy});
$frame = $mw->Frame(-height=>’10’,-width=>’30’,-relief=>’groove’,-borderwidth=>’3′)->pack(-fill=>’x’,-pady=>’0′);

@border = (0,0,0,1);

$arrayVar->{"0,0"} = "%";
$arrayVar->{"0,1"} = "Artist";
$arrayVar->{"0,2"} = "Album";
$arrayVar->{"0,3"} = "Year";
$arrayVar->{"0,4"} = "Genre";
$table = $frame->Scrolled(‘Spreadsheet’,
?-cols => 5,
?-width => 5, -height => 6,
?-titlerows => 1,
?-variable => $arrayVar,
?-selectmode => ‘multiple’,
?-selecttype => ‘row’,
?-resizeborders => ‘col’,
?-bg => ‘white’,
?-rowheight => 2,
?-bd => \@border,
?-justify => ‘left’,
?-drawmode => ‘compatible’,
?-wrap => 0,
?-relief => ‘solid’
)->pack(-fill=>’both’);
$table->rowHeight(0,1);
$table->tagRow(‘title’,0);
$table->tagConfigure(‘title’, -bd=>2, -relief=>’raised’);
$table->colWidth(0,5,3,6,4,10);
MainLoop();