wxWidgets: Properly making a user control that contains other controls inside itself

Question

I'm trying to make a user control in wxWidgets to represent a channel in an audio mixer. So, each channel has a standard set of controls inside itself (some sliders, buttons, etc..).

So inside my class I have a sizer in which I add the various child controls I need. So far that works.

But the problems I have are

• if I derive from wxPanel, the layout of the control works as I expect it (it gets expanded in the sizer to fit the child controls), however none of the children get any events (like EVT_LEFT_DOWN etc). I tried connecting an event for the main control that runs event.Skip() but that didn't help.

• If I change my class to derive from wxControl instead (or wxFrame, or possibly a number of others I tried), the child controls do get events, but the whole thing doesn't get expanded in the sizer it's located in, it just gets drawn as a tiny box (some 10-20 square px) even though the child controls take up much more space.

Any ideas?

Update:

mangoMixerStrip.cpp

mangoMixerStrip::mangoMixerStrip(wxFrame* parent, HostChannel* channel) : wxPanel(parent)
{
    myChannel = channel;
    SetBackgroundColour(wxColour(172,81,90));

    wxBoxSizer* s = new wxBoxSizer(wxVERTICAL);

    // some custom controls i made which all work fine when added like any other control, derived from wxPanel also
    faderPan = new mangoFader(parent, 200, false, 55);
    faderGain = new mangoFader(parent, 200, true, 126);    
    buttonSolo = new mangoButton(parent, false, ButtonGraphic::Solo);

    s->Add(faderPan);
    s->Add(buttonSolo);
    s->Add(faderGain);

    this->SetSizer(s);

    this->Connect(wxEVT_LEFT_DOWN, wxMouseEventHandler(mangoMixerStrip::mouseDown)); // this function simply contains event.Skip()
}

in my main wxFrame

mangoFrameMain::mangoFrameMain(wxWindow* parent) : FrameMain( parent )
{   
    HostChannel* h =  new HostChannel();
    h->setName("what up"); // these 2 lines unrelated to the UI

    mangoMixerStrip *test = new mangoMixerStrip(this, h);
    this->GetSizer()->Add(test, 1, wxFIXED_MINSIZE, 0);
}

And to clarify: the mangoMixerStrip instance itself gets any events I connect to it, but its child controls do not.

Answer 1

Your controls should be children of your class derived from wxPanel, NOT children of the panel's parent.

   faderPan = new mangoFader(parent, 200, false, 55);

should be

  faderPan = new mangoFader(this, 200, false, 55);