Toolbox/Dialogs

This page of developer code and/or digital audio documentation is part of a collection of pages for learning about our code. We aim to increasingly add interactive diagrams to these pages and over time connect better to the doxygen documentation.

Dialogs and Sizers

Audacity uses wxSizers from wxWidgets library to lay out controls in dialogs. We don't use the sizers directly. Instead we have our own class ShuttleGUI. ShuttleGUI creates controls and sizers and keeps track of their nesting. ShuttleGUI can also exchange data, sending values for display in the dialog, or extracting data from the dialog.

The class ShuttleGUI reduces a great deal of repetitive code.

Constructing a Dialog

Here's an example of constructing a dialog using ShuttleGUI that's in file Echo.cpp for the 'echo effect'.

 170 void EffectEcho::PopulateOrExchange(ShuttleGui & S)
 171 {
 172    S.AddSpace(0, 5);
 173 
 174    S.StartMultiColumn(2, wxALIGN_CENTER);
 175    {
 176       S.Validator<FloatingPointValidator<double>>(
 177             3, &delay, NumValidatorStyle::NO_TRAILING_ZEROES,
 178             MIN_Delay, MAX_Delay
 179          )
 180          .AddTextBox(XO("Delay time (seconds):"), wxT(""), 10);
 181 
 182       S.Validator<FloatingPointValidator<double>>(
 183             3, &decay, NumValidatorStyle::NO_TRAILING_ZEROES,
 184             MIN_Decay, MAX_Decay)
 185          .AddTextBox(XO("Decay factor:"), wxT(""), 10);
 186    }
 187    S.EndMultiColumn();
 188 }

Here's the dialog it produces:

Rough notes...
- Help Icon links to help system
- Panels used on some dialogs
- Custom controls (NumericTextCtrl) for use in dialogs and toolbars
- Custom validators

Relevant Classes

Here are some more classes relevant to dialogs.