docs/latex/wx/ttips.tex

   1 \section{wxTipProvider overview}\label{tipsoverview}
   2
   3 Many "modern" Windows programs have a feature (some would say annoyance) of
   4 presenting the user tips at program startup. While this is probably useless to
   5 the advanced users of the program, the experience shows that the tips may be
   6 quite helpful for the novices and so more and more programs now do this.
   7
   8 For a wxWindows programmer, implementing this feature is extremely easy. To
   9 show a tip, it's enough to just call \helpref{wxShowTip}{wxshowtip} function
  10 like this:
  11
  12 \begin{verbatim}
  13     if ( ...show tips at startup?... )
  14     {
  15         wxTipProvider *tipProvider = wxCreateFileTipProvider("tips.txt", 0);
  16         wxShowTip(windowParent, tipProvider);
  17         delete tipProvider;
  18     }
  19 \end{verbatim}
  20
  21 Of course, you need to get the text of the tips from somewhere - in the example
  22 above, the text is supposed to be in the file tips.txt from where it's read by
  23 the {\it tip provider}. The tip provider is just an object of a class deriving
  24 from \helpref{wxTipProvider}{wxtipprovider}. It has to implement one pure
  25 virtual function of the base class: \helpref{GetTip}{wxtipprovidergettip}.
  26 In the case of the tip provider created by
  27 \helpref{wxCreateFileTipProvider}{wxcreatefiletipprovider}, the tips are just
  28 the lines of the text file.
  29
  30 If you want to implement your own tip provider (for example, if you wish to
  31 hardcode the tips inside your program), you just have to derive another class
  32 from wxTipProvider and pass a pointer to the object of this class to wxShowTip
  33 - then you don't need wxCreateFileTipProvider at all.
  34
  35 Finally, you will probably want to save somewhere the index of the tip last
  36 shown - so that the program doesn't always show the same tip on startup. As you
  37 also need to remember whether to show tips or not (you shouldn't do it if the
  38 user unchecked "Show tips on startup" checkbox in the dialog), you will
  39 probably want to store both the index of the
  40 last shown tip (as returned by
  41 \helpref{wxTipProvider::GetCurrentTip}{wxtipprovidergetcurrenttip} and the flag
  42 telling whether to show the tips at startup at all.
  43