Welcome to wxFormBuilder’s issue tracking system! We hope that wxFormBuilder provides you with many hours of increased productivity.
Please feel free to post bug reports and feature requests here. You can feel free to discuss an issue or feature on the forum but if you decide it needs to be looked at you need to post it here. If a feature request or bug report is not on this site there is a good chance it won’t be worked on. So, as a rule, post them here.
Thanks for your cooperation,
The wxFormBuilder Team
FS#383 - Render empty Sizers in the Editor.
|
DetailsI would really like to be able to see my empty sizers visually within the Form Editor. This is something I’ve already seen in wxGlade and thought it was a really good idea, and really helps users layout the controls on a container. I’ve attached a screen shot from wxGlade to show what I’m talking about. To give a brief description, all empty sizers/sizeritems are rendered with some default texture/pattern (in the case of wxGlade, slanted lines) to indicate the area it would occupy. This allows the user to actually see the sizer layout visually all through development. I think this would really assist users in form design. 
wxGlade_Editor_Sizers.png
(9.8 KiB)
|
Well I like the idea in a sense, but wxFormBuilder uses a much different approach to GUI design then what I have seen in the past. It uses "What You See Is What You Get". That means the way it looks in wxFormBuilder will be identical to the way it looks in your application. With this in mind I feel that feature is unneeded and in fact gets in the way of the goal to render the form exactly like it will look.
Now you are probably thinking, "What if I want to use a control that wxFormBuilder doesn't support?". Well there is a Custom Control widget that you can use in the same fashion as you described in you description, except it doesn't look different (have slashes). Now if that is what you would like I could see that being added as a feature.
We might be able to add an option to turn on sizer highlight for all sizers not just the selected one, if that would help.
Well, it's not supposed to be _exactly_ like wxGlade; I was just using that as an example. Also, the finalized product would not actually contain this code / render the sizers (it's not a custom widget). This would be strictly limited to within wxFormBuilder. The idea is still to keep it WYSIWYG, but with even more 'hints' so to speak. When you are using multiple row/col sizers, it can be helpful if the designer can visualize the remaining unoccupied sizers / the overall layout.
Having an option to turn on sizer highlighting for all sizers sounds like the general idea; would it also highlight individual cells as shown in the screenshot (for grid-based sizers)? The basic idea is to give the user the option to visualize the overall / underlaying layout. In the current system, if you are starting out with a complex layout with multiply nested sizers it's difficult to see where you are headed. If the user could see the sizers visually it would give them immediate feedback to the entire layout so they would a clear picture of where their layout is headed.
I am still very new to wxSizers, and wxWidgets in general so I might just be getting ahead of myself. I'm just finding it a bit difficult to design layouts with sizers when I can't actually see the sizers / layout. Most of the examples I come across are using very simple layouts, even those that claim to be 'complex'; all of them follow the same format: vertical box sizer, with horizontal box sizer children. This works ok for dialogs, as it's fairly easy to visual this type of window, but when you start getting into non-standard layouts using flexgrids/bagsizers, etc. or even just lots of nested box sizers it can be difficult to visualize the entire layout.
I hope I've cleared my up my intentions :/
I agree with Jamarr. I am a beginner with sizer myself. Without this capability, I had a hard time playing around with nested sizers. For now, I'm using wxGlade to deal with sizers.