///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// // Name: wx/textcompleter.h // Purpose: interface of wxTextCompleter // Author: Vadim Zeitlin // Created: 2011-04-13 // Copyright: (c) 2011 Vadim Zeitlin // Licence: wxWindows licence ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// /** @class wxTextCompleter Base class for custom text completer objects. Custom completer objects used with wxTextEntry::AutoComplete() must derive from this class and implement its pure virtual method returning the completions. You would typically use a custom completer when the total number of completions is too big for performance to be acceptable if all of them need to be returned at once but if they can be generated hierarchically, i.e. only the first component initially, then the second one after the user finished entering the first one and so on. When inheriting from this class you need to implement its two pure virtual methods. This allows returning the results incrementally and may or not be convenient depending on where do they come from. If you prefer to return all the completions at once, you should inherit from wxTextCompleterSimple instead. @since 2.9.2 */ class wxTextCompleter { public: /** Function called to start iteration over the completions for the given prefix. This function could start a database query, for example, if the results are read from a database. Notice that under some platforms (currently MSW only) it is called from another thread context and so the appropriate synchronization mechanism should be used to access any data also used by the main UI thread. @param prefix The prefix for which completions are to be generated. @return @true to continue with calling GetNext() or @false to indicate that there are no matches and GetNext() shouldn't be called at all. */ virtual bool Start(const wxString& prefix) = 0; /** Called to retrieve the next completion. All completions returned by this function should start with the prefix passed to the last call to Start(). Notice that, as Start(), this method is called from a worker thread context under MSW. @return The next completion or an empty string to indicate that there are no more of them. */ virtual wxString GetNext() = 0; }; /** A simpler base class for custom completer objects. This class may be simpler to use than the base wxTextCompleter as it allows to implement only a single virtual method instead of two of them (at the price of storing all completions in a temporary array). Here is a simple example of a custom completer that completes the names of some chess pieces. Of course, as the total list here has only four items it would have been much simpler to just specify the array containing all the completions in this example but the same approach could be used when the total number of completions is much higher provided the number of possibilities for each word is still relatively small: @code class MyTextCompleter : public wxTextCompleterSimple { public: virtual void GetCompletions(const wxString& prefix, wxArrayString& res) { const wxString firstWord = prefix.BeforeFirst(' '); if ( firstWord == "white" ) { res.push_back("white pawn"); res.push_back("white rook"); } else if ( firstWord == "black" ) { res.push_back("black king"); res.push_back("black queen"); } else { res.push_back("white"); res.push_back("black"); } } }; ... wxTextCtrl *text = ...; text->AutoComplete(new MyTextCompleter); @endcode @library{wxcore} @since 2.9.2 */ class wxTextCompleterSimple : public wxTextCompleter { public: /** Pure virtual method returning all possible completions for the given prefix. The custom completer should examine the provided prefix and return all the possible completions for it in the output array @a res. Please notice that the returned values should start with the prefix, otherwise they will be simply ignored, making adding them to the array in the first place useless. Notice that this function may be called from thread other than main one (this is currently always the case under MSW) so the appropriate synchronization mechanism should be used to protect the shared data. @param prefix The possibly empty prefix that the user had already entered. @param res Initially empty array that should be filled with all possible completions (possibly none if there are no valid possibilities starting with the given prefix). */ virtual void GetCompletions(const wxString& prefix, wxArrayString& res) = 0; };