> > I upgraded the showcase dialog (now in CVS) to have an option to do > > channel previews. > > How exactly are you doing this? Are you rendering an > actually-gathered PDB file on the desktop? Or are you simply gathering the > raw website into a 160x160 pane?
I wanted to avoid transcoding issues, (and to keep current without having to have someone maintain it) the preview is rendered live from the web. I was actually considering calling the checkbox option "Show live preview". I actually had a 160x160 pane, but rewrote to use windowsplitters so could resize bigger if so desired (the h1 font renders quite big, etc). When select a channel, an address for the preview page is loaded into an wxHtmlWindow class window. wxHtmlWindow is generally too worthless to use for anything other than showing help files (what is was created for, really), since only a bare minimum of tags are supported [to keep things light]. However, these bare tags are the ones pretty much used in handheld sites anyways, so I thought this would work well. There was some things to smooth out though: -wxHtmlWindow will only load files ending in .html or .htm [others will just display the source} unless add specific filters (which though documented, didn't seem to be all that well laid out as to what to do there). Problem since some channels are .shtml, .asp, .cfm, etc. -Virtual filesystems are supposed to be implemented for the web and zip files. However, seemed to stick on not knowing how to parse out an absolute url within a rendered page (but would know to get a src-"http://.."; or a src="file_in_the_same_directory" ). -Internet filestreams are difficult to manage since don't know where they end, and other stuff. Implementation was to: -Open a filestream and download the data to a temp file (using wxGetTempFile or something to automatically know where to download the file in the OS's location for temp files). -Load and run through the file, replacing the href="" and src="" tags with their absolute url equivalent. Keep the reformatted text as a string. -Set that string to the htmlwindow, and the images will appear correctly with the text. There is no doubt better ways to do this, and probably best would be to patch the wxWindows InternetFileSystem, and send back the patch. Another is rewriting the href/src tag in the wxWindows parser. Another is doing replacements on the textstream as it is downloaded and sending the output to the htmlwindow without using a downloaded file at all. Current limitations are: -wxURL is not HTML1.1 compliant, so redirects rarely work, and usually need to specify the full name of the actual file on the net. -Only the first page renders with src="", and href="" replacements. If click down, nope. -Unknown reason why certain site's images report as "no image handler found", even though the jpg, gif, and png handlers are loaded and ready. Perhaps due to some comments or something in the image file when saved. -In general for wxWindows, image pallettes not always rendered very well if a desktop is set to 256-colors. Was considering recycling the function to download a url to a local file to use for updating the plucker_showcase.htm from the web to a local file, when user clicks the appropriate button. Best wishes, Robert
