Little help for bloody beginner

Hi Morten,

I agree there's still a lot that could be done to make this
more intuitive. I'll consider adding a help window advising
what can be added to the selected item, and/or add appropriate
items to the item's context menu.

At 20:11 20/06/2006, you wrote:
>I'm still new to wxWidgets so forgive me if I ask something stupid.
>I read a lot about the sizer philosophy and I think it's great.
>However, I'm still struggeling in my GUI design. How do I decide when
>to place a sizer and when e.g. another panel. For example: THere is a
>wxNotebook sizer. Is this for inside the notebook's pages or do I
>place the notebook inside this sizer?

In fact wxNotebookSizer is deprecated since wxWidgets 2.5.2 or so,
and all you need to do is add panels (or other windows) under the
wxNotebook. However, the panels (pages) you add to the wxNotebook
could well have their own sizers under them, in order to layout
each page's controls. Wizards are similarly self-laying-out,
but here there is an explicit wxWizardPage to add to the wizard,
instead of an arbitrary window.

> And when do I put the panels
>inside the notebook? What about the splitwindow? After adding this, to
>I need to place two panels first, or two sizers and then the panels?
>These are the kind of questions I'm not confident with. I'm not
>talking about basic GUI design here - this works quite well (so far...).

wxSplitterWindow lays out its 2 windows itself, so just add 2 windows
under the splitter. Again, those 2 windows might have sizers under
them.

>My question is: Am I worried too much or does DialogBlock simply
>doesn't allow placing something inside something that does not fit
>and/or would require an additional (specific type of) sizer?

DB tries to veto inappropriate item placement though some things
slip through. However you can get a few hints from the Elements
sample, if you're stuck.

Thanks for your patience! As I say, more could be done to reduce
the ambiguity, and I'll give it some thought.

Regards,

Julian

First of all: Thank you both Alan and Julian for the answers. In fact
you've already helped me a lot.

> I'll consider adding a help window advising what can
> be added to the selected item, and/or add appropriate
> items to the item's context menu.
This sound like a wonderful idea to me. I think this would be really
helpful for beginners allthough I can imagine that not all cases can
be covered. What I did so far was googeling for "XRC files"; and
looking at how somebody else is laying out what I'd like to achive...
not very convenient, of course, but again: I'm still in the beginner's
phase.

> In fact wxNotebookSizer is deprecated since wxWidgets 2.5.2
Oh, I didn't know that. Now I know why DB doesn't have this... You
see - googeling might not always a good idea because this part I
obvioulsy had taken from a legacy application...

> DB tries to veto inappropriate item placement though
> some things slip through. However you can get a few
> hints from the Elements sample, if you're stuck.
I've had a look inside the Examples folder already. But I have simply
overseen the "pjd" file in there! Stupid me! You see: For beginners
it's hard to obtain such layout philosophies from the source code and
I thought in the examples folder are "just" examples as within the
wxWidgets distro... Now that I've openend the pjd file I can inspect
the layout visually!!! Brilliant!!!

With best regards, Morten.