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<HTML>
<head><title>Overview</title></head>
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<H2>Overview</H2>
<P>
The dialog editor is written as a library, to be invoked by other programs. As you can see,
dialoged.cc is a very small program which invokes the main window via a wxResourceManager
object. The wxResourceManager object controls the user interface and other aspects
of the dialog editor.<P>
There is wxResourceTable object in wxResourceManager: this contains a list of
all the wxItemResources currently being edited. wxResourceTable and wxItemResource
are classes already in wxWindows, defined in wx_res.h. In order to edit a new
dialog box, the dialog is created, and the existing event handler is temporarily replaced
with a new one which defines editing functionality. This allows existing dialogs - even
instances of subclasses of wxDialogBox - to be edited, the application-specific functionality
being temporarily taken over by the dialog editor.<P>
In order to edit the properties of a dialog box or item, a property list editor is invoked.
This uses the property classes from utils/wxprop. In order to map between properties and the
actual window API, such as SetSize and GetSize, a 'proxy' class called wxPropertyInfo
has been defined, with a subclass for each class of wxWindows window to be edited.
This class defines the main members SetProperty, GetProperty, GetPropertyNames,
which transform the normal API into 'property' terms.<P>
Properties are mostly extracted directly from the window being edited. This is
in contrast with wxBuilder, where everything is stored in a set of parallel
data structures, and windows 'properties' only only set. However, there
are exceptions to this rule in the dialog editor. There <I>is</I> in fact a set of
parallel objects, the wxItemResource objects which can be seen listed in
the main Dialog Editor window as a dialog is built up. These usually parallel
the properties in the windows, but occasionally this is not possible. For example,
all dialog boxes being edited must be modeless: or the user would not be
able to access other windows. However, the user must be able to specify that
when used in an application, that dialog box will be modal. In this case,
the value in the wxItemResource will not match that in the actual dialog box.<P>
There is a major problem with taking values directly from the windows: this
information sometimes does not match what went in. In Motif and XView,
size values returned are not the same as those given. This causes speedy
'degeneration' of window properties. Under Windows, properties are almost
always consistent. The other platforms will need to be catered for by
relying more on the wxItemResource objects, and not taking size
information directly from windows.<P>
<A HREF="dlged24.htm#topic16"><B>Dynamic setting versus recreation</B></A><BR>
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