added Id keyword

[wxWidgets.git] / docs / doxygen / overviews / tips.h

/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
// Name:        tips
// Purpose:     topic overview
// Author:      wxWidgets team
// RCS-ID:      $Id$
// Licence:     wxWindows license
/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

/*!

 @page tips_overview wxTipProvider overview

 Many "modern" Windows programs have a feature (some would say annoyance) of
 presenting the user tips at program startup. While this is probably useless to
 the advanced users of the program, the experience shows that the tips may be
 quite helpful for the novices and so more and more programs now do this.
 For a wxWidgets programmer, implementing this feature is extremely easy. To
 show a tip, it is enough to just call #wxShowTip function
 like this:

 @code
 if ( ...show tips at startup?... )
     {
         wxTipProvider *tipProvider = wxCreateFileTipProvider("tips.txt", 0);
         wxShowTip(windowParent, tipProvider);
         delete tipProvider;
     }
 @endcode

 Of course, you need to get the text of the tips from somewhere - in the example
 above, the text is supposed to be in the file tips.txt from where it is read by
 the @e tip provider. The tip provider is just an object of a class deriving
 from #wxTipProvider. It has to implement one pure
 virtual function of the base class: #GetTip.
 In the case of the tip provider created by
 #wxCreateFileTipProvider, the tips are just
 the lines of the text file.
 If you want to implement your own tip provider (for example, if you wish to
 hardcode the tips inside your program), you just have to derive another class
 from wxTipProvider and pass a pointer to the object of this class to wxShowTip
 - then you don't need wxCreateFileTipProvider at all.
 You will probably want to save somewhere the index of the tip last
 shown - so that the program doesn't always show the same tip on startup. As you
 also need to remember whether to show tips or not (you shouldn't do it if the
 user unchecked "Show tips on startup" checkbox in the dialog), you will
 probably want to store both the index of the
 last shown tip (as returned by
 wxTipProvider::GetCurrentTip and the flag
 telling whether to show the tips at startup at all.
 In a tips.txt file, lines that begin with a # character are considered comments
 and are automatically skipped. Blank lines and lines only having spaces are also
 skipped.
 You can easily add runtime-translation capacity by placing each line of the
 tips.txt file inside the usual translation macro. For example, your tips.txt
 file would look like this:

 @code
 _("This is my first tip")
 _("This is my second tip")
 @endcode

 Now add your tips.txt file into the list of files that gettext searches
 for translatable strings. The tips will thus get included into your
 generated .po file catalog and be translated at runtime along with the rest of
 your application's translatable strings.
 Note1: Each line in the tips.txt file needs to strictly begin with exactly the
 3 characters of underscore-parenthesis-doublequote, and end with
 doublequote-parenthesis, as shown above.
 Note2: Remember to escape any doublequote characters within the tip string with
 a backslash-doublequote.
 See the dialogs program in your samples folder for a working example inside a
 program.

 */