Nateo Concept: Tooltips

Regular Tooltips and HTML Tooltips

Users can move the mouse cursor over any object that is visible. When this happens, the NtTimeChartControl accesses the application's programm code by calling the function NtGetTooltipText() of the interface NtApplication in order to retrieve a string with the appropriate tooltip text. For this tooltip text there are three different options depending on the NtDisplayDef.tooltipType that is set for the data type that is accessed by the mouse:

If NtDisplayDef.tooltipType is 0 then no tooltip is being created at all.
If NtDisplayDef.tooltipType is 1 then the text that is being returned by NtGetTooltipText() is used as a regular tooltip.
If NtDisplayDef.tooltipType is 2 then the text that is being returned by NtGetTooltipText() is used as a HTML string that is rendered as a HTML page.

Please see the screenshot overlay below: A NtTimeChartControl showing pressure and temperature curves. The data type temperature is configured by its NtDisplayDef to have a simple tooltip while pressure is configured to have html tooltip. The HTML tooltip is made of a headline, an image and a text. The background color and the border are set up in the HTML of the tooltip as well.

This example shows that you can design powerful tooltips using html. The only thing you need to be aware of is that HTML tooltips require more calculation power.

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