Some WINE questions....

[Gary Stout]

Today, I downloaded the latest WINE beta and it appears it is working better than my last experience with it. On several of my EZGUI applications, I have missing labels. So far, I haven't noticed any other controls not appearing. Some labels work fine while others are gone. Sometimes changing from one tab to another (switching layers) will restore the missing labels. Just curious if anyone else using WINE has ran into this problem?
WINE looks like it has came a long way in the last year or so. Its been a while since I tried it last.

Thanks,
Gary

[Gary Stout]

Chris,

I have made a little bit of discovery on this......All of the labels in question have the "I" Invisible property included. If I remove the "I" property, then the labels display fine. On a form with the default grey background, this would not be a problem, but wouldn't look good if the form was colored.

Hopefully that info helps,

Gary

[Chris Boss]

Wine may not support the WS_EX_TRANSPARENT extended window style (which is what the I property does).

[Chris Boss]

Just as a note, even Windows itself when using Themes does not support the I property (WS_EX_TRANSPARENT).

Themes don't support all of the features available in non-themed versions of windows. Not sure why, but it is a sad fact.

[Rod Gobby]

We've recently been making changes to our programs, and have been experimenting with the I (invisible) option on controls such as Shape and Frame.

We've had no problems so far, but we've decided not to use the feature in our code. Instead, we're making sure that we apply the correct Z-order to Page forms, shapes, frames, and controls, so that we don't have to rely on the Invisible feature.

We're using Ubuntu 10.04 (long term support), Wine 1.3.21, PB 10.01, and EZGUI 5.0

R

[Gary Stout]

Chris,

Do you have any idea which Windows system DLL would affect the drawing of Labels? Wine and Crossover have the ability to use either built-in system DLL's or native DLL's. I was going to try and experiment to see if I could improve the missing label situation. What is strange is that some labels appear just fine, even with the "I" property set, but many do not. For the most part, things work pretty good under Wine, but if a few little quirks could be improved, it would be great!

Thanks,
Gary

[Chris Boss]

The I property makes the label use the WS_EX_TRANSPARENT extended window style. This means the operating system will draw all the other controls first and then it will draw all the controls with the WS_EX_TRANSPARENT style afterwards. I would do a search on the web of problems in Wine with WS_EX_TRANSPARENT to see if there are any issues with it.

[Gary Stout]

Chris,

Thanks for the reply. I did do a search for WS_EX_TRANSPARENT and Wine and did find some issues reported....no solutions found though. I think I have mentioned this before, but I couldn't find the message to re-read your response. I am wondering what or how Firefly handles the transparent property. Even though I have never got a grasp on FF, it seems to handle transparent labels under Wine just fine...Would it not also be using WS_EX_TRANSPARENT?

Just curious...
Gary

[Chris Boss]

EZGUI defaults to the following styles for all controls:

WS_CLIPSIBLINGS
WS_CLIPCHILDREN

maybe FireFly does not use these and that makes a difference.

In the Designer, the control properties dialog has a property/option to turn off defauly clipping. Try that.