[glade--]customizing

Hi,

My project is attempting to just depend on the .glade xml files and use 
libglademm to realize the gui's.

I could not find a way to tell libglade to instantiate my custom widget 
instead of its own (drawing area) widget.

So for a proof of concept I got the widget by name, found its parent, 
removed the widget from the parent, added my instantiated widget in its 
place... like so:

refXml->get_widget("ogl_drawing_area", oda);
Gtk::Container *parent = (Gtk::Container *)oda->get_parent();
if (!parent) {
   std::cerr << "could not get parent!" << std::endl;
   exit(1);
}

parent->remove(*oda);
SimpleGLScene *ogl_widget = new SimpleGLScene();
parent->add(*ogl_widget);

parent->show_all_children(true);

Clearly my inexperience with gtk shows :)

I am guessing there is a much better way to do this, could someone point 
me in the right direction?

thanks,
--mc