XRC concepts

These are the typical steps for using XRC files in your application.

• Include the appropriate headers: normally "wx/xrc/xmlres.h" will suffice;
• If you are going to use XRS files, install wxFileSystem ZIP handler first with wxFileSystem::AddHandler(new wxZipFSHandler);
• call wxXmlResource::Get()->InitAllHandlers() from your wxApp::OnInit function, and then call wxXmlResource::Get()->Load("myfile.xrc") to load the resource file;
• to create a dialog from a resource, create it using the default constructor, and then load it using for example wxXmlResource::Get()->LoadDialog(&dlg, this, "dlg1");
• set up event tables as usual but use the XRCID(str) macro to translate from XRC string names to a suitable integer identifier, for example EVT_MENU(XRCID("quit"), MyFrame::OnQuit).

To create an XRC file, you can use one of the following methods.

• Create the file by hand;
• use wxDesigner (#2), a commercial dialog designer/RAD tool;
• use DialogBlocks (#2), a commercial dialog editor;
• use XRCed (#2), a wxPython-based dialog editor that you can find in the wxPython/tools subdirectory of the wxWidgets CVS archive;
• use wxGlade (#2), a GUI designer written in wxPython. At the moment it can generate Python, C++ and XRC;
• convert WIN32 RC files to XRC with the tool in contrib/utils/convertrc.

A complete list of third-party tools that write to XRC can be found at www.wxwidgets.org/lnk_tool.htm (#2).

It is highly recommended that you use a resource editing tool, since it's fiddly writing XRC files by hand.

You can use wxXmlResource::Load in a number of ways. You can pass an XRC file (XML-based text resource file) or a zip-compressed file (extension ZIP or XRS) containing other XRC.

You can also use embedded C++ resources