Listen to events

Introduction

In order to be able to listen to an event in your application you need three things: a listener, an event and an handler. The listener tells to your application to listen for a certain event, the event is the action that you want to catch, and the handler tells to your application what to do when that event is triggered. To add a listener to your app, you have to define it in the setup method of your App.cpp file, using the method ofAddListener.

ofAddListener(theEventThatImListening , this, &myHandler);

In the App.cpp file, you also have to define what myHandler is doing

void myHandler(arguments & event){
  //do something
}

Default events

Any openFrameworks app, comes at the beginning with handlers for a lot of events:

void keyPressed(int key);
void keyReleased(int key);
void mouseMoved(int x, int y );
void mouseDragged(int x, int y, int button);
void mousePressed(int x, int y, int button);
void mouseReleased(int x, int y, int button);
void mouseEntered(int x, int y);
void mouseExited(int x, int y);
void windowResized(int w, int h);
void dragEvent(ofDragInfo dragInfo);
void gotMessage(ofMessage msg);

You don't need to add the listeners for this handlers, because they are already there for you, ready to use.

Resources

• If you want to create listener for your class (not in ofApp.cpp), have a look at the example examples/events/SimpleEventsExample. In general, in the folder examples/events there are a lot of useful resources about events, also about how to create custom events.
• The openframeworks documentation has a section for events