Widget: CheckButton

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← Widget API < CheckButton

Making Checkboxes

You can make a checkbox in WoW via the following commands:

myCheckButton = CreateFrame("CheckButton", "myCheckButton_GlobalName", parentFrame, "ChatConfigCheckButtonTemplate");

This is where you locate the checkbox relative to its parent frame. Coordinates are (0,0) is the top-left corner of the parent, so a negative y-coordinate means down and positive x-coord means right.

myCheckButton:SetPoint("TOPLEFT", 200, -65);

You can reference the name of your Check Box either by writing it explicitly, or by making a function call. Writing it explicitly "looks prettier", but might be confusing to anyone looking at your code, as the name for it seems made-up. Note arg2 in the creation call. It is the same as what is below, but we have appended it with "Text". This is necessary, I don't know why they didn't just set it up so you can do myCheckButton:Text, but we must work with what we're given.

myCheckButton_GlobalNameText:SetText("CheckBox Name");

Here is the code to do exactly the same thing, but it's not explicitly written. This is (arguably) less confusing.

getglobal(myCheckButton:GetName() .. 'Text'):SetText("CheckBox Name");

When mousing over your checkbox, you can have a tooltip appear, which is useful to describe the actions resulting from clicking the checkbox, without putting it all in the name.

myCheckButton.tooltip = "This is where you place MouseOver Text.";

Set up what happens when you click the checkbox. You can add other scripts similarly to how I have this one, you just need to change the "OnClick" to whatever else. http://www.wowwiki.com/Category:Widget_event_handlers Note that you cannot pass arguments to the "OnClick" script's function, but you can do other things as in a normal function

myCheckButton:SetScript("OnClick", 
  function()
    --do stuff
  end);

Example entirely in Lua

myCheckButton = CreateFrame("CheckButton", "myCheckButton_GlobalName", UIParent, "ChatConfigCheckButtonTemplate");
myCheckButton:SetPoint("TOPLEFT", 200, -65);
myCheckButton_GlobalNameText:SetText("CheckBox Name");
myCheckButton.tooltip = "This is where you place MouseOver Text.";
myCheckButton:SetScript("OnClick", 
  function()
    --do stuff
  end
);

Recommendation

However, I recommend creating a generic "checkbox-factory function", like this:

local uniquealyzer = 1;
function createCheckbutton(parent, x_loc, y_loc, displayname)
	uniquealyzer = uniquealyzer + 1;
	
	local checkbutton = CreateFrame("CheckButton", "my_addon_checkbutton_0" .. uniquealyzer, parent, "ChatConfigCheckButtonTemplate");
	checkbutton:SetPoint("TOPLEFT", x_loc, y_loc);
	getglobal(checkbutton:GetName() .. 'Text'):SetText(displayname);

	return checkbutton;
end

myCheckButton = bw_addon.createCheckbutton(UIParent, 400, -600, "A Checkbox");
myCheckButton.tooltip = "If this is checked, nothing will happen, because this is a demo checkbox.";
myCheckButton:SetScript("OnClick", 
   function()
      -- do stuff
   end
);

My reason for recommending this is that it is easy to port the checkbox code into a new addon, and it is also a lot more compact (3 lines per checkbox, instead of 6). Also, it is harder to make copy/pasta mistakes with a checkbox-factory.