Adding code to your Kanzi applications

While you can create a Kanzi application using only Kanzi Studio, creating your application using the Kanzi Engine API provides you much more control and flexibility.

For example, to create a phone book where users can add, edit, and remove entries, you create a template for the phone book entries in Kanzi Studio, but use the Kanzi Engine API to add, edit, and remove the entries, and load images from the device running the application.

This tutorial focuses on implementing a simple application and introduces you to:

• Application framework. The Kanzi application framework consists of one access-point function called kzApplicationConfigure and several callback functions defined in the KzaApplicationProperties instance passed as an argument to kzApplicationConfigure function. In this tutorial most of the code is in the KzaApplicationProperties.onProjectLoaded callback implementation.
• Kanzi Studio project binary file. The project is built in Kanzi Studio into an efficiently loaded binary format (kzb file) which is declared at the application side in kzApplicationConfigure. The binary file is loaded by the framework, after which the KzaApplicationProperties.onProjectLoaded callback is entered.
• Access content from the Kanzi Studio project binary and object node. The KzuObjectNode class is a convenient abstraction for all nodes in the scene graph tree (contains all nodes that are traversed during a rendering cycle). In the tutorial you load most of the UI components as KzuObjectNodes for further manipulation. You can query to and from the object node representation for class-specific operations all node types that inherit from the object node class.
• Properties, resource IDs, URLs, and aliases. All members of the project, including object nodes, layers, materials, animations, even the project itself have properties that are subject to operations specific to their designated type. For example, you can change the texture property for a widget icon plane and the name of the widget displayed in a text block. In the tutorial you learn about property types, resource IDs, URLs, and aliases.
• Input manipulator. Input manipulators define the input events that nodes generate. In the tutorial, you add a click input manipulator to the Back button in the information layer and to the grid list box to handle all messages from its children.
• Event handler. While an input manipulator enables an object to generate events from user input, event handlers for their part receive and process the messages. In the tutorial a click event handler starts two animations and resets properties: visibility of the information layer and Hit Testable property for the grid list box.

Before you start this tutorial, make sure you have your Kanzi development environment set up. You need to:

• Download and install Kanzi.
• Install Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1.

See Installing Kanzi.

If you want to better understand how parts of Kanzi Engine work, see API reference.

This tutorial assumes you understand the basics of working with Kanzi Studio. The best entry points for getting familiar with Kanzi Studio are:

• Creating your first application tutorial
• Hello world tutorial
• Workspace overview

Start with the tutorial >

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