Messages
Prev Chapter 3. Hello, World! Next

Messages

Now we're cookin' with Crisco, but let's press on and see what other things we can do to improve this. You may have noticed by now that the only way to quit the program is to close the window using the window manager's "close window" option, or to just kill the program outright. We can do better than that. Let's add a message handler for the FXButton such that when you click the button, it causes the program to exit:

require 'fox16'

include Fox

theApp = FXApp.new

theMainWindow = FXMainWindow.new(theApp, "Hello")
theButton = FXButton.new(theMainWindow, "Hello, World!")
theButton.connect(SEL_COMMAND) do |sender, selector, data|
  exit
end
theApp.create

theMainWindow.show

theApp.run

Most FOX objects send out messages (also known as events) when something interesting happens. FOX messages have four important elements:

  1. The message sender is the object that sends the message. In this case, the FXButton instance is the sender.

  2. The message type is a predefined integer constant that indicates what kind of event has occurred (i.e. why this message is being sent). In this case, the message type is SEL_COMMAND, which indicates that the command associated with this widget should be invoked.

  3. The message identifier is another integer constant that is used to distinguish between different messages of the same type. For example, the message that tells a FOX window to make itself visible is a SEL_COMMAND message with the identifier FXWindow::ID_SHOW (where ID_SHOW is a constant defined in the FXWindow class). A different message identifier, FXWindow::ID_HIDE, tells an FXWindow instance to make itself invisible.

  4. The message data is an object containing message-specific information. For this case (the FXButton's SEL_COMMAND message, there is no interesting message data, but we'll see other kinds of messages where the message data is useful.

For historical reasons, the message type and identifier are usually packed into a single 32-bit unsigned integer known as the selector, and this is the value that is passed into the message handler block. Since we don't actually need to use the sender, selector or data arguments for this particular message handler, we can just ignore them and shorten the code to:

theButton.connect(SEL_COMMAND) { exit }

Re-run the program and push the button to convince yourself that it works.

Prev Up Next
Better living through buttons Home Adding a tool tip