Making a fancy looking window with messages stack

Question

I try to make fancy looking messages viewer, where messages divided by formatting, other background of smth. similar. They need to looks like this - http://pastebin.com/GU1Lq087. What I found in wxWidgets to solve this problem, and why I can't use it:

1. wxHtmlWindow

   Supports minimal HTML (a few tags). But big problem with this - html representation doesnt fill parent window. So element with width=100% will have 100% width only on standard window size. And even p tag doesnt have word wrapping (long long paragraph goes in one line with vertical scroolbar).

2. wxWebWiew

   I need to have the ability to set generated HTML to it, but IE must to load some page first and I can rely only on IE background. It has some time to load page, even if I set HTML-string.

3. wxRichText

   Most suitable for me. But I can't draw line like HTML's hr, or change background for the entire message block (to distinguish it from common background)

I need to show messages like this. But i didn't know how and which tool is better.

Answer 1

1. One way of achieving this would be using wxWebView with WebKit backend but I am afraid that Windows can only use IE's engine. However, there is project which allows you to use Gecko engine. I use WebKit for rendering chat in my application and it works really good (although I am using Qt). (http://www.kirix.com/labs/wxwebconnect.html)
2. You can always do it regular way - just create separate widget (I think it is called "frame" in wxWidgets) for single message. This way you get almost infinite possibilities. E.g. you can make "AbstractMessage" with virtual methods and then things like "AdministratorMessage", "MOTD" etc. will be a breeze.

Answer 2

wxRichText Most suitable for me. But I can't draw line like HTML's hr

Really? Have you looked at the docs?

( http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/overview_richtextctrl.html )

Here's a couple simple ideas:

a. Write a line of blanks, underlined.

http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/classwx_rich_text_ctrl.html#a333b2e675617ed2299cf91e7c0dbd0d8

b. Create an image of a horizontal line, display it using WriteImage

http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/classwx_rich_text_ctrl.html#a1315611c0741d03e852ee26eba3a9d94

Answer 3

The funny thing is that what you want can be done using any of the 3 controls you mention. With wxHtmlWindow you just need to set its size correctly, with wxWebView I don't understand what your problem with it is at all and with wxRichTextCtrl you could just use separate controls for the areas with different backgrounds (you could almost certainly use a single control with different styles but using several controls seems simpler).