August Augmentations

August has been a busy month this year, with a couple of new classes being
added and several minor enhancements to the existing ones as well. Even though none of these changes is particularly major, they should hopefully be useful to wxWidgets users, just as they were useful for me when working on my projects.

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The first of the new classes is wxBannerWindow. As you can see from the screenshot at that link, it is a particularly simple class as it is static in appearance and basically doesn't do anything except providing some information about the current window to the user and, mostly, just looking nice. Of course, it was always pretty simple to do something like this with wxWidgets and personally I had already done it a few times but having a standard class for this makes using it even easier, especially as it can also be defined in the XRC resources and so added to your existing dialogs very easily.

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The second new class is actually not really a new class at all but a wrapper for an existing one: wxTreeListCtrl is a façade for wxDataViewCtrl which is not nearly as flexible as the full wxDataViewCtrl class but is much easier to use in a special yet common case when you just want to have a multi-column tree control, optionally with icons and, also optionally, check boxes, in the first column, like this:


What you can't see on the screenshot is that the source code of the new treelist sample is much simpler than that of the dataview sample. Of course, this simplicity comes at a price: you can't have "infinitely" many items in this control because it stores all of them internally. However if you have a control with relatively few (not more than a couple of thousands) items, then this is probably not a big problem and this control can be a simple alternative to wxDataViewCtrl. And, of course, wxTreeListCtrl features are a union of those of wxTreeCtrl and wxListCtrl and so it may also provide a simple solution if you're currently using one of those controls but need the extra features (multiple columns or hierarchical items) not available in it.

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And then there were several enhancements to the existing classes:

• Navaneeth has contributed a useful wxTextCtrl::PositionToCoords() method allowing to find the pixel coordinates of the given character in wxTextCtrl. This allows to show auto-completion window at the right position, for example.



• wxMessageDialog and, hence, wxMessageBox(), have gained support for wxHELP button. Beyond the ability to provide help in your message boxes this is significant because you can now have up to 4, instead of 3, as before, buttons in your message boxes. And as using SetHelpLabel() you can set arbitrary text for this button, it means you can now propose more choices to the user if really necessary (an advance warning: 4 is as high as it will go).



• A new wxTextEntry::AutoCompleteDirectories() was added. Unfortunately, just as AutoCompleteFileNames(), it is currently MSW-only. But at least on this platform it makes using controls used for entering directory names in them more convenient for the user. Moreover, wxFilePickerCtrl and wxDirPickerCtrl now call the appropriate completion function automatically for their integrated text control and so you don't even need to worry about not forgetting to do it yourself if you use one of those handy controls.



• Another MSW-specific change is the addition of wxTopLevelWindow::MSWGetSystemMenu(). This function can be used to add items to the "system" window of Windows programs. Using it is inherently not portable but can still be useful even in cross-platform applications: for example, you could use it to add an "About" item to the system menu under MSW if your application doesn't have any normal menu bar. This is actually consistent with OS X where all applications have the standard "About" item in their "Apple" menu, whether they have a menu bar or not. Maybe in the future we will provide a higher level interface for this but for now this function can be helpful.



• Some cleanup was done as well: SetImageList() and AssignImageList() now work consistently for all controls, as discussed in this thread. And wxDataViewCtrl::GetSelection() now works consistently in all ports, after the changes proposed here were implemented. New, more clear, wxComboBox::IsTextEmpty() and IsListEmpty() were added to replace IsEmpty() whose behaviour was inconsistent in different port. Finally, Stefan fixed long-standing issue with Ctrl vs Cmd keys confusion in wxOSX after this discussion.

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More new features are planned for September too, notably I'm personally planning to add a new wxTimePickerCtrl class and also wxBalloonTooltip. Any help with their development or participation in discussion of the API of the new classes is always welcome on wx-dev.