Probably the best way to learn wxWidgets is by reading the source of some 80+ samples provided with it. Many aspects of wxWidgets programming can be learnt from them, but sometimes it is not simple to just choose the right sample to look at. This overview aims at describing what each sample does/demonstrates to make it easier to find the relevant one if a simple grep through all sources didn't help. They also provide some notes about using the samples and what features of wxWidgets are they supposed to test.
There are currently more than 80 different samples as part of wxWidgets: the list in this page is not complete! You should start your tour of wxWidgets with the Minimal Sample which is the wxWidgets version of "Hello, world!". It shows the basic structure of wxWidgets program and is the most commented sample of all - looking at its source code is recommended.
The next most useful sample is Widgets Sample which shows many of wxWidgets controls, such as buttons, text entry zones, list boxes, check boxes, combo boxes etc. It is organized in many different source files, one per each control, which makes it easier to study it, and also allows to change various control styles and call its methods interactively.
Other, more complicated controls, have their own samples. In this category you may find the following samples showing the corresponding controls:
Notice that all wxWidgets samples mentioned above can be found in samples
subdirectory of the library distribution. When a foobar
sample is mentioned below, its sources can be found in samples/foobar
directory of your wxWidgets tree. If you installed wxWidgets from a binary package, you might not have this directory. In this case, you may view the samples online at http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/samples/ but you need to download the source distribution in order to be able to build them (highly recommended).
Final advice is to do a search in the entire samples directory if you can't find the sample showing the control you are interested in by name. Most classes contained in wxWidgets occur in at least one of the samples.
Build Note: You may need to build the wxWidgets library with wxUSE_ACCESSIBILITY
being set to 1 to be able to make it work, please read comments in <wx/setup_inc.h>
for more info.
Location: samples/access
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/access
Location: samples/animate
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/animate
Location: samples/artprov
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/artprov
Location: samples/aui
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/aui
Location: samples/calendar
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/calendar
Location: samples/caret
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/caret
Location: samples/collpane
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/collpane
Location: samples/combo
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/combo
See wxConfig Overview for the descriptions of all features of this class.
Location: samples/config
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/config
Location: samples/console
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/console
The various controls tested are listed here:
samples/controls
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/controls
Location: samples/dataview
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/dataview
Location: samples/clipboard
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/clipboard
For the report processing part of the sample to work you should make available a Web server accepting form uploads, otherwise wxDebugReportUpload will report an error.
Build Note: You may need to build the wxWidgets library with wxUSE_DEBUGREPORT
and wxUSE_ON_FATAL_EXCEPTION
being set to 1 to be able to make it work, please read comments in <wx/setup_inc.h>
for more info.
Location: samples/debugrpt
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/debugrpt
In addition to the dialogs accessible from the sample menus, you can also run it with a --progress=style
command line option to show a wxProgressDialog with the given style (try 0 for the default style) on program startup, before the main window is shown.
Location: samples/dialogs
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/dialogs
Using the menu entries, you may also dial or hang up the line if you have a modem attached and (this only makes sense for Windows) list the available connections.
Location: samples/dialup
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/dialup
Location: samples/display
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/display
When you run the sample, its screen is split in several parts. On the top, there are two listboxes which show the standard derivations of wxDropTarget: wxTextDropTarget and wxFileDropTarget.
The middle of the sample window is taken by the log window which shows what is going on (of course, this only works in debug builds) and may be helpful to see the sequence of steps of data transfer.
Finally, the last part is used for dragging text from it to either one of the listboxes (only one will accept it) or another application. The last functionality available from the main frame is to paste a bitmap from the clipboard (or, in the case of the Windows version, also a metafile) - it will be shown in a new frame.
So far, everything we mentioned was implemented with minimal amount of code using standard wxWidgets classes. The more advanced features are demonstrated if you create a shape frame from the main frame menu. A shape is a geometric object which has a position, size and color. It models some application-specific data in this sample. A shape object supports its own private wxDataFormat which means that you may cut and paste it or drag and drop (between one and the same or different shapes) from one sample instance to another (or the same). However, chances are that no other program supports this format and so shapes can also be rendered as bitmaps which allows them to be pasted/dropped in many other applications (and, under Windows, also as metafiles which are supported by most of Windows programs as well - try Write/Wordpad, for example).
Take a look at DnDShapeDataObject class to see how you may use wxDataObject to achieve this.
Location: samples/dnd
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/dnd
Location: samples/docview
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/docview
Location: samples/dragimag
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/dragimag
Location: samples/drawing
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/drawing
Location: samples/erase
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/erase
Location: samples/event
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/event
Build Note: You need to build the library with wxUSE_EXCEPTIONS
being set to 1
and compile your code with C++ exceptions support to be able to build this sample.
Location: samples/except
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/except
It also shows how to capture the output of the child process in both synchronous and asynchronous cases and how to kill the processes with wxProcess::Kill() and test for their existence with wxProcess::Exists().
Location: samples/exec
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/exec
The sample comes with 2 Flash files (SWF), showing a simple Flash animation which can be controlled using the "Play", "Stop" and "Back"/"Forward" buttons in the sample as well as a Flash form which shows how Flash and wxWidgets program can exchange data: calling "GetText" function without arguments returns the text of the text control defined inside Flash and calling "SetText" with an argument sets the control contents to the given string. Finally clicking on the button generates an event which is caught by the C++ program.
Location: samples/font
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/font
Location: samples/grid
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/grid
Location: samples/help
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/help
samples/html
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/html
Location: samples/htlbox
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/htlbox
At the bottom of the main frame there is a test for using a monochrome bitmap by drawing into a wxMemoryDC. The bitmap is then drawn specifying the foreground and background colours with wxDC::SetTextForeground() and wxDC::SetTextBackground() (on the left). The bitmap is then converted to a wxImage and the foreground colour (black) is replaced with red using wxImage::Replace().
This sample also contains the code for testing the image rotation and resizing and using raw bitmap access, see the corresponding menu commands.
Location: samples/image
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/image
More information about this sample can be found in the readme.txt
file in its directory. Please also see the Internationalization overview.
Location: samples/internat
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/internat
Location: samples/ipc
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/ipc
Location: samples/joytest
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/joytest
This sample can be used to interactively test the events produced by pressing various keyboard keys. It also shows the interaction between accelerators and the normal keyboard events (which are overridden by any defined accelerators) and finally allows to test that not skipping an event in EVT_KEY_DOWN handler suppresses the subsequent EVT_CHAR event.
Location: samples/keyboard
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/keyboard
The menu in this sample offers two more tests, one showing how to use a wxBoxSizer in a simple dialog and the other one showing how to use sizers in connection with a wxNotebook class. See also wxSizer.
Location: samples/layout
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/layout
The sample also provides some timings for adding/deleting/sorting a lot of (several thousands) items into the control.
Location: samples/listctrl
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/listctrl
samples/mdi
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/mdi
It replaces the old dynamic
sample.
Location: samples/mediaplayer
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/mediaplayer
Location: samples/memcheck
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/memcheck
Build Note: You may need to build the wxWidgets library with wxUSE_MEMORY_TRACING
and wxUSE_DEBUG_CONTEXT
being set to 1 to be able to make it work, please read comments in <wx/setup_inc.h>
for more info.
Location: samples/menu
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/menu
For build instructions please read IMPORTANT NOTES in mfctest.cpp
.
Location: samples/mfc
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/mfc
Location: samples/minimal
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/minimal
Location: samples/nativdlg
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/nativdlg
Location: samples/notebook
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/notebook
Location: samples/oleauto
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/oleauto
samples/opengl
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/opengl
Location: samples/ownerdrw
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/ownerdrw
Location: samples/popup
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/popup
samples/power
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/powerBuild Note: You may need to build the wxWidgets library with
wxUSE_PRINTING_ARCHITECTURE
being set to 1 to be able to make it work, please read comments in <wx/setup_inc.h>
for more info.
Location: samples/printing
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/printing
This sample demonstrates wxPropertyGrid.
Location: samples/propgrid
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/propgrid
Location: samples/regtest
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/regtest
Location: samples/render
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/render
Location: samples/richtext
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/richtext
Location: samples/sashtest
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/sashtest
This sample demonstrates use of the wxScrolledWindow class including placing subwindows into it and drawing simple graphics. It uses the SetTargetWindow method and thus the effect of scrolling does not show in the scrolled window itself, but in one of its subwindows.
Additionally, this samples demonstrates how to optimize drawing operations in wxWidgets, in particular using the wxWindow::IsExposed() method with the aim to prevent unnecessary drawing in the window and thus reducing or removing flicker on screen.
Location: samples/scroll
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/scroll
samples/shaped
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/shapedThe server binds to the local address, using TCP port number 3000, sets up an event handler to be notified of incoming connection requests (wxSOCKET_CONNECTION events), and sits there, waiting for clients (listening, in socket parlance). For each accepted connection, a new wxSocketBase object is created. These socket objects are independent from the server that created them, so they set up their own event handler, and then request to be notified of wxSOCKET_INPUT (incoming data) or wxSOCKET_LOST (connection closed at the remote end) events. In the sample, the event handler is the same for all connections; to find out which socket the event is addressed to, the GetSocket function is used.
Although it might take some time to get used to the event-oriented system upon which wxSocket is built, the benefits are many. See, for example, that the server application, while being single-threaded (and of course without using fork() or ugly select() loops) can handle an arbitrary number of connections.
The client starts up unconnected, so you can use the Connect... option to specify the address of the server you are going to connect to (the TCP port number is hard-coded as 3000). Once connected, a number of tests are possible. Currently, three tests are implemented. They show how to use the basic IO calls in wxSocketBase, such as wxSocketBase::Read(), wxSocketBase::Write(), wxSocketBase::ReadMsg() and wxSocketBase::WriteMsg(), and how to set up the correct IO flags depending on what you are going to do. See the comments in the code for more information. Note that because both clients and connection objects in the server set up an event handler to catch wxSOCKET_LOST events, each one is immediately notified if the other end closes the connection.
There is also a URL test which shows how to use the wxURL class to fetch data from a given URL.
The sockets sample is work in progress. Some things to do:
samples/sockets
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/socketssound
sample shows how to use wxSound for simple audio output (e.g. notifications).
Location: samples/sound
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/sound
Location: samples/splash
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/splash
Location: samples/splitter
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/splitter
Here you can see how to recreate the statusbar (with possibly different number of fields) and how to use it to show icons/bitmaps and/or put arbitrary controls into it.
Location: samples/statbar
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/statbar
Location: samples/stc
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/stc
Location: samples/svg
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/svg
TAB
key, hence the sample name) between different controls. It shows the use of wxWindow::MoveBeforeInTabOrder() and MoveAfterInTabOrder() methods to change the default order of the windows in the navigation chain and of wxWindow::Navigate() for moving focus along this chain.
Location: samples/taborder
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/taborder
Location: samples/taskbar
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/taskbar
Secondly it shows how to intercept a wxKeyEvent in both the raw form using the EVT_KEY_UP
and EVT_KEY_DOWN
macros and the higher level from using the EVT_CHAR
macro. All characters will be logged in a log window at the bottom of the main window. By pressing some of the function keys, you can test some actions in the text ctrl as well as get statistics on the text ctrls, which is useful for testing if these statistics actually are correct.
Thirdly, on platforms which support it, the sample will offer to copy text to the wxClipboard and to paste text from it. The GTK version will use the so called PRIMARY SELECTION, which is the pseudo clipboard under X and best known from pasting text to the XTerm program.
Last but not least: some of the text controls have tooltips and the sample also shows how tooltips can be centrally disabled and their latency controlled.
Location: samples/text
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/text
There are two fundamentally different ways to use threads in GUI programs and either way has to take care of the fact that the GUI library itself usually is not multi-threading safe, i.e. that it might crash if two threads try to access the GUI class simultaneously.
One way to prevent that is have a normal GUI program in the main thread and some worker threads which work in the background. In order to make communication between the main thread and the worker threads possible, wxWidgets offers the wxQueueEvent function and this sample demonstrates its usage.
The other way is to use a wxMutexGuiEnter and wxMutexGuiLeave functions, but this is not currently shown in the sample.
See also Multithreading Overview and wxThread.
Location: samples/thread
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/thread
The following things are demonstrated:
EVT_UPDATE_UI
handler for automatically enabling/disabling toolbar buttons without having to explicitly call EnableTool. This is done in MyFrame::OnUpdateCopyAndCut().
If you toggle another toolbar in the sample (using Ctrl-A
) you will also see the radio toolbar buttons in action: the first three buttons form a radio group, i.e. checking any of them automatically unchecks the previously checked one.
Location: samples/toolbar
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/toolbar
Adding, inserting and deleting items and branches from the tree as well as sorting (in default alphabetical order as well as in custom one) is demonstrated here as well - try the corresponding menu entries.
Location: samples/treectrl
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/treectrl
samples/typetest
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/typetestThis sample shows some features of wxUIActionSimulator class. When a simulation is ran using its menu items, you can see that the button is pressed programmatically and the characters generated by the program appear in the text control.
Location: samples/uiaction
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/uiaction
Location: samples/validate
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/validate
Location: samples/vscroll
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/vscroll
Location: samples/widgets
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/widgets
samples/wizard
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/wizard
Location: samples/wrapsizer
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/wrapsizer
samples/xrc
subdirectory of your wxWidgets installation or http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/xrc
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