## wxTipProvider overview

Many "modern" Windows programs have a feature (some would say annoyance) of presenting the user tips at program startup. While this is probably useless to the advanced users of the program, the experience shows that the tips may be quite helpful for the novices and so more and more programs now do this.

For a wxWindows programmer, implementing this feature is extremely easy. To show a tip, it is enough to just call wxShowTip function like this:

        if ( ...show tips at startup?... )
        {
            wxTipProvider *tipProvider = wxCreateFileTipProvider("tips.txt", 0);
            wxShowTip(windowParent, tipProvider);
            delete tipProvider;
        }

Of course, you need to get the text of the tips from somewhere - in the example above, the text is supposed to be in the file tips.txt from where it is read by the tip provider. The tip provider is just an object of a class deriving from wxTipProvider. It has to implement one pure virtual function of the base class: GetTip. In the case of the tip provider created by wxCreateFileTipProvider, the tips are just the lines of the text file.

If you want to implement your own tip provider (for example, if you wish to hardcode the tips inside your program), you just have to derive another class from wxTipProvider and pass a pointer to the object of this class to wxShowTip - then you don't need wxCreateFileTipProvider at all.

Finally, you will probably want to save somewhere the index of the tip last shown - so that the program doesn't always show the same tip on startup. As you also need to remember whether to show tips or not (you shouldn't do it if the user unchecked "Show tips on startup" checkbox in the dialog), you will probably want to store both the index of the last shown tip (as returned by wxTipProvider::GetCurrentTip and the flag telling whether to show the tips at startup at all.