Admit it – this is one of those questions that, sooner or later, arise to every Xojo newcomer: How can I add new UI controls to the Window at runtime? And if you are considering this too, then the good news is that the answer is more simple than you probably expect… sitting right there on the Inspector under the Attributes tab. Yes, this is all about the Control Set!
Comments closedAuthor: Javier Menendez
In programming, iterators are the mechanisms that allow us to walk all the members of a collection without needing to know in advance how many of them compose such a collection; and for that we can find in Xojo the commands For Each… Next. What are the main differences in comparison to the conventional For… Next?
The first difference is that with For Each… Next we can’t assume that we are iterating the members of the collection in order, as it is the case when using the variable of the conventional For… Next as the Index in order to access a known member of the collection. The second difference is that the iterator will be invalid when the iterated elements are modified, or when we modify the amount of elements in the collection during the iteration process.
By default in Xojo, there are a couple of collections that are iterable: the already mentioned Arrays and also Dictionaries and FolderItem.Children. Wouldn’t it be great to extend this feature so we can add this behaviour to our own classes making them more flexible? The key to making this happen is using the two Class Interfaces already included in Xojo: Iterator and Iterable.
Comments closedSome days ago (or long, long ago, depending when do you read these lines) I received an email from a developer that was porting code from his old VisualBasic domain to the native, multi-platform Xojo. He asked me how can to get the difference between two dates? I’m pretty sure that most of you will have the answer, but I told him he’ll need Xojo.Core.Date and Xojo.Core.DateInterval. If you want to know how easy it is or how to get the same result for all your code based on the old date class, then I invite you to continue reading…
Comments closedipify is a very useful web service (an API) that promises to always be available to attend requests, letting us know the public (or external) IP address we are using to connect to Internet. We can get this small piece of information as pure Text or in JSON or XML formats.
This post was updated in 2021 to using Xojo’s API 2.0.
Comments closedAmong other topics, Cryptography and data ciphering always fascinated me. Beyond their mathematical perspective, most of the time it is a matter of putting them in practice with developed solutions: dealing with data only visible between the transmitter and the receiver. As it happens, the Xojo framework makes it really easy to deal with ciphered data.
Comments closedThe ContainerControl is one of the most versatile control classes included in the Xojo framework both for Desktop and Web apps. In fact, it paves the way to complex UI controls creation with the same simplicity you are used to while designing your window layouts. Even better, once you create your complex UI controls using the ContainerControl, you will be able to add them to your Window layouts as if they were regular controls. Plus, you will enjoy the fruits of better OOP encapsulation and the fact that you can create and use the controls dynamically at run time. Want to see this in action? Follow this tutorial and video to create the basis of a multiplatform search field based on the ContainerControl class.
Comments closedThe Inspector Behavior is a feature that you were probably not aware of at first glance when using the Xojo IDE. It is tightly related to the Inspector Panel you are already using for adjusting all the control settings and other classes instances properties.
Comments closedSooner or later your app will need to work with files, maybe to save the data generated with the app itself, to open the files created with other apps or because is the main purpose of the utility you are working on. Xojo gives you the class FolderItem fully loaded with a useful bunch of properties that allow you to examine the attributes of any file; for example, the creation or modification of dates, the file path (in several formats), if the file is an alias, etc. The FolderItem class also gives you the methods to do a lot of file operations without effort.
Comments closedXojo is a modern, powerful programming language with an IDE that simplifies all kind of tasks related your project creation and deployment. One such helpful feature is the UI layout design; you can find it under the Library Panel, it’s a meaningful collection of graphic classes (Controls) ready to use in our apps. Probably one of the first and most used controls in apps design is the TextField, TextField simplifies the way an app can get the input from the user. Let’s see its main properties and how this control behaves when used in Desktop, Web (WebTextField) and iOS (iOSTextField) apps!
You can watch the video (in Spanish, with English subtitles) as you read and work through this post.
Comments closedYou already know, you can use Xojo to create practically any kind of application; from apps used by corporations, Universities and even Government agencies around the world, to apps used by photographers, designers and, of course, developers; and even those small utilities that makes our lives a bit easier.
In fact, a lot of these little utilities are what are known as Wrappers. That is, a nice user interface that simplifies and makes more user friendly a feature that is already available in the native operating system; often, in the form of one or more combined commands that need to be typed from the Command Line prompt.
You can watch the video (in Spanish, with English subtitles) as you read and work through this example.
Comments closed