The objective of this lesson is to show you how to make a simple web page navigation using Wt. Before starting you have to remember that Wt can be used to create 1 URL applications. That means you can have a full application that runs using just one URL. However it is also useful to give your users different URL’s to take advantage of some browser features like bookmarks or the back and forward buttons.
In this entry I’m going to create a simple form that shows how to add items to WComboBox in two different ways. The first one is useful for static combo items while the second one might be used to populate a combo from a database.
The code is based on our previous Hello World application. There are few lines that changed.
Using Static Combo Items Adding items to a WComboBox is just a matter of calling the addItem method.
In this entry I’m going to create a simple form. This form will show you how to use controls and events in a very simple way.
A couple things you have to notice before we start:
I’m going to inherit from WContainerWidget. As you now know, I could have inherited from WApplication too. Most controls like, WLabel, WLineEdit and WPushButton include a “parent” parameter in their constructors. But you can also create them and add them later to any WContainerWidget.
Let’s start by talking a little bit about some elements and methods you will find in the code.
Inheriting from WApplication or WContainerWidget are the most common ways to start an application using Wt. A WApplication instance will be in charge of creating your html, head and body tags. A WContainerWidget is usually a div tag (it can also be turned into a ul or ol by using its setList method).
Installing Wt can be a challenging task if you don’t have the right tools. I spent many days trying to make it work with MinGW and Visual Studio 2005. No luck. Here are some of my results:
MinGW I was never able to make a full compile. It was interrupted by this or that reason. I could never get any of the examples to work.
Visual C++ Express 2005 Some of the examples worked, however only in “Release” mode.
