Re: [lmi] wxHelpController versus wxxrc tooltips

[Greg Chicares]

On 2006-3-22 1:18 UTC, Vadim Zeitlin wrote:
> 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).

Is there a wx sample that shows context-sensitive help in action?
I don't see it when I run the html/help or html/helpview samples.
I haven't been able to build samples/help, but glanced at the
source and didn't see anything like this. I even downloaded a
precompiled Mahogany because I don't want to seem unresourceful,
but it doesn't appear to use context-sensitive help.

The reason why I'd like to see a sample is so that I don't have
to ask you so many questions. I just don't understand this part:

> works slightly differently, even if it also uses the tooltips (but with
> different parameters).

and I'm sure a sample would make it clear to me. But that's okay:
I'll ask my big question at the bottom.

> 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.

That's great. Probably Wendy and I are the only people who've ever
found it useful to edit lmi's XRC files while the program's running,
and that's a minor detail.

> 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.

I was going to say "No, look at our legacy application", but it
doesn't do this either, and in fact the things it has that look
like tooltips are produced only with the '?' button, not by
hovering the mouse.

> 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.

It's not worth spending any time on IMO.

> 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.

Okay, then that's what we'll do.

Here's the big question I promised above. You were planning to
take a look at porting the help stuff from our legacy application.
Much help text is scattered over many source files, but it's all
in the nature of tooltips (short pop-up messages) even if the '?'
was needed to display it. As an alternative, we could ourselves
move that data into our '.xrc' files:
 - we could do that immediately, and users would like it
 - the text should be reviewed by an insurance specialist anyway
 - you'd have far fewer files to look at
Would that work? I just don't understand the interaction between
XRC and wxHelpController well enough to see whether this is a
good idea. But we're always looking for incremental usability
improvements that we can do quickly and cheaply, and adding
tooltips may be such an opportunity.