Window Styles and WxRuby Constants Overview

Window Styles

Many visual and interactive properties of controls and windows are influenced by the use of “style flags”. These are Ruby constants within the Wx module, and look like this

Wx::SUNKEN_BORDER
Wx::MINIMIZE_BOX
Wx::TE_READONLY

Some style flags are relevant for most windows, such as Wx::SUNKEN_BORDER. A full list of these constants can be found in the documentation for the Window class.

Other style flags are relevant for most varieties of frames and dialogs - anything that is likely to be displayed with a title bar and a frame drawn by the desktop/window manager. An example of these constants is MINIMIZE_BOX, which displays a button to minimize the frame. A full list of these constants is in the Frame documentation.

There are also style flags that are relevant only to a specific class of window. An example is Wx::TE_READONLY, which is only meangingful for TextCtrl widgets. These names for these constants has a prefix indicating which class it is relevant to. TE prefix for TextCtrl, SP for SpinCtrl, TR for TreeCtrl and so on.

Using style flags in constructors

All these types of constants are usually used when creating a new window:

text = Wx::TextCtrl.new(parent, -1, 'Some text', Wx::DEFAULT_POSITION,
                           Wx::DEFAULT_SIZE, Wx::TE_READONLY)

To combine style flags, simply join them with the pipe symbol ’|’, ruby’s logical OR operator.

text = WxTextCtrl.new(.....
                      Wx::TE_READONLY|Wx::SUNKEN_BORDER|Wx::TE_MULTILINE)

If you hate typing ‘Wx::’ all the time, include the Wx module in your class:

class MyTextCtrl
  include Wx
  ...
  style = TE_READONLY|SUNKEN_BORDER|TE_MULTILINE

[This page automatically generated from the Textile source at Thu May 01 00:50:49 +0100 2008]