Re: [lmi] wxHelpController versus wxxrc tooltips

[Vadim Zeitlin]

On Tue, 21 Mar 2006 23:35:20 +0000 Greg Chicares <address@hidden> wrote:

GC> We've been talking about adapting the interactive help system
GC> from our legacy application to use wxHelpController. Now I've
GC> stumbled across the 'tooltip' tag in wxxrc and discovered that
GC> it can be used for controls in a notebook page or dialog, which
GC> is one of the things I suppose wxHelpController would do.

 No, not quite. Tooltips are usually short and it's not very comfortable to
read longer text in them as they tend to disappear. Context-sensitive help
under Windows is implemented with the special "?" button in the title bar
(although it could be also activated just by pressing F1, of course) and
works slightly differently, even if it also uses the tooltips (but with
different parameters).

GC> But sometimes I guess wrong, so I thought I'd ask. The ideal
GC> would be that wxHelpController somehow extracts tooltips (and
GC> maybe even 'help' and 'longhelp' tags) from '.xrc' files--even
GC> more ideally, at run time, without recompiling the help file.

 This is already happens: "tooltip" XRC tag is used for the tooltip, of
course, and "help" is used for context-sensitive help. It's not
automatically reloaded when an XRC file changes though, you need to reload
them yourself I think.

GC> Let me note some limitations of wxxrc tooltips that don't seem
GC> ideal, if I may use that word again: they don't display for
GC>  - wxStaticText controls

 I think this should work in 2.7 (and while I didn't test it yet, I'd
definitely fix it if it's still a problem).

GC>  - disabled controls that could accept focus if enabled

 This doesn't/can't work, indeed. And it's annoying as sometimes you'd
really like to have help exactly to know what do you need to do to make
this control enabled.

GC>  - tabs on notebook pages

 It might be possible to make this work but I'm not 100% sure about it.
Please let me know if it's worth looking at this.

GC> But, again, I imagine that wxHelpController is
GC> the One True Way that we should focus on.

 I believe you should use both tooltips and help. Tooltips are really too
useful to not be used IMHO.

 Regards,
VZ