RAPID Tutorial

You may also (or instead) be interested in the Novice Mode Tutorial.

Step 1:  Open RAPID.  A window such as the following will appear:

Step 2: Push the new button (the leftmost button on the top row).  The following window appears:

Fill in the name and title as shown above.  Recall that you must have a window named "main", which is the main window of your application.

Step 3: Click the label selector (leftmost of bottom row of buttons) and then click and drag out a rectangle where you want a text label to appear.

Step 4:  Fill in the label properties window (name, text, justification and colors).  Note that the widget name must be a legal Ada variable name.  Justification may be left, center, or right.  For colors, you can pick "default", or the name of a color (Red, Pink, Green, LightGreen, DarkGreen, ForestGreen, Blue, LightBlue, DarkBlue, Cyan, LightCyan, Purple, Magenta, Yellow, LightYellow, Orange, Gray, LightGray, DarkGray, Brown, Black, White).  These colors are found in mcc-tki-colors.ads (in the mcc_gui folder).

Step 5:  Let's go ahead and build this application.  Hit the save button and when the dialog comes up, save your work.  Note that the code will be generated in the same folder where you create the .GUI file.  Now hit the compile button.  Compilation is extremely fast, so you may think nothing happened.  You should now have main_window.ads and main_window.adb in the folder you created.  You now need to add a main program (see main_program.adb) or below:

with Main_Window;

use  Main_Window;

with Mcc.Tki.Container.Window;

procedure Main_Program is

   Main_Window.Generate_Window;

end Main_Program;

Compile, build and run.  You should get the following application window:

Note that the program exits when you click the X in the upper right corner of this window.

Step 6:  Now let's add a text button.  Go back to the RAPID window, push the text button button, and draw another rectangle.  Fill in the textbutton properties window as shown:

We now need to create the actions package.  Create both actions.ads and actions.adb (note the required parameter for the Push_Me procedure).

Now your program will toggle the text in the label each time the button is pushed.  Note also that we reference the label as Main_Window.My_Label (My_Label was the name we picked for the label in RAPID).  We also looked at mcc-tki-widget-label.ads to find the Set_Text method and its parameters.

Look in the example folder for an example using menus, and also involving a single application with two windows.