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1/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
2// Name: tips
3// Purpose: topic overview
4// Author: wxWidgets team
5// RCS-ID: $Id$
6// Licence: wxWindows license
7/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
8
9/*!
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75b31b23 11 @page overview_tips wxTipProvider overview
36c9828f 12
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13 Many "modern" Windows programs have a feature (some would say annoyance) of
14 presenting the user tips at program startup. While this is probably useless to
15 the advanced users of the program, the experience shows that the tips may be
16 quite helpful for the novices and so more and more programs now do this.
17 For a wxWidgets programmer, implementing this feature is extremely easy. To
18 show a tip, it is enough to just call #wxShowTip function
19 like this:
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21 @code
22 if ( ...show tips at startup?... )
23 {
24 wxTipProvider *tipProvider = wxCreateFileTipProvider("tips.txt", 0);
25 wxShowTip(windowParent, tipProvider);
26 delete tipProvider;
27 }
28 @endcode
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30 Of course, you need to get the text of the tips from somewhere - in the example
31 above, the text is supposed to be in the file tips.txt from where it is read by
32 the @e tip provider. The tip provider is just an object of a class deriving
33 from #wxTipProvider. It has to implement one pure
34 virtual function of the base class: #GetTip.
36c9828f 35 In the case of the tip provider created by
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36 #wxCreateFileTipProvider, the tips are just
37 the lines of the text file.
7f2a1fc8 38
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39 If you want to implement your own tip provider (for example, if you wish to
40 hardcode the tips inside your program), you just have to derive another class
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41 from wxTipProvider and pass a pointer to the object of this class to wxShowTip -
42 then you don't need wxCreateFileTipProvider at all.
43
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44 You will probably want to save somewhere the index of the tip last
45 shown - so that the program doesn't always show the same tip on startup. As you
46 also need to remember whether to show tips or not (you shouldn't do it if the
47 user unchecked "Show tips on startup" checkbox in the dialog), you will
48 probably want to store both the index of the
36c9828f 49 last shown tip (as returned by
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50 wxTipProvider::GetCurrentTip and the flag
51 telling whether to show the tips at startup at all.
7f2a1fc8 52
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53 In a tips.txt file, lines that begin with a # character are considered comments
54 and are automatically skipped. Blank lines and lines only having spaces are also
15b6757b 55 skipped.
7f2a1fc8 56
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57 You can easily add runtime-translation capacity by placing each line of the
58 tips.txt file inside the usual translation macro. For example, your tips.txt
15b6757b 59 file would look like this:
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61 @code
62 _("This is my first tip")
63 _("This is my second tip")
64 @endcode
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65
66 Now add your tips.txt file into the list of files that gettext searches
67 for translatable strings. The tips will thus get included into your
68 generated .po file catalog and be translated at runtime along with the rest of
69 your application's translatable strings.
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71 Note1: Each line in the tips.txt file needs to strictly begin with exactly the
72 3 characters of underscore-parenthesis-doublequote, and end with
73 doublequote-parenthesis, as shown above.
7f2a1fc8 74
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75 Note2: Remember to escape any doublequote characters within the tip string with
76 a backslash-doublequote.
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36c9828f 78 See the dialogs program in your samples folder for a working example inside a
15b6757b 79 program.
36c9828f 80
15b6757b 81 */
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82
83