At the moment we do not provide pre-built binaries for wxCharts. Any installation must be made by rebuilding the code from source.
The wxCharts build uses CMake.
wxCharts depends on the wxWidgets framework. How to install wxWidgets is beyond the scope of this document but installing with APT should work.
Regardless of what installation method you choose, the following CMake command used by the wxCharts build files must be able to find the wxWidgets installation correctly.
find_package(wxWidgets REQUIRED COMPONENTS core base)
For on instance on Ubuntu 22.04.4 LTS the following works:
sudo apt install libwxgtk3.0-gtk3-dev
Once wxWidgets is installed clone the wxCharts repository and build the wxCharts library with CMake.
git clone [email protected]:wxIshiko/wxCharts.git
cd wxCharts
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make
At the end of these steps you should have the file libwxcharts.a in the build/bin directory.
You can now install the wxCharts header file and libraries to /usr/local.
sudo make install
You can now verify the correct installation by building and running one of the samples.
cd ..
cd samples/linechart
cmake .
make
This should have successfully built the linechart executable. Running it with
./linechart
should display a windows with a line chart.
wxCharts depends on the wxWidgets framework. There are several ways to install wxWidgets on Windows but we are going to recommend a specific procedure because installation on Windows can be hard to get right and issues are difficult to troubleshoot. Also refer to the official instructions found at https://docs.wxwidgets.org/latest/plat_msw_install.html.
Regardless of what installation method you choose, the following CMake command used by the wxCharts build files must be able to find the wxWidgets installation correctly.
find_package(wxWidgets REQUIRED COMPONENTS core base)
We recommend the following installation procedure.
Download the ZIP archive for the latest source code (3.2.6 at the time of writing) from https://www.wxwidgets.org/downloads/ and extract it. We'll refer to the location where the source code has been installed as <wxwidgets_source_root>.
Now define a new environment variable WXWIN that points to <wxwidgets_source_root>. This environment
variable is required because it is used by the wxCharts build to find the location of xWidgets. While there are other
ways to locate the wxWidgets installation this is a fairly simple and robust way to do so.
Now navigate to the %WXWIN%\build\msw directory. In that directory you will find a series of wx_vcXY.sln build files
for different versions of Visual Studio and also a makefile.vc file. You can build wxWidgets by opening one of the
wx_vcXY.sln and doing a build or by using nmake with the makefile.vc file as explained in
https://docs.wxwidgets.org/latest/plat_msw_install.html.
For a first try I strongly recommend building wxWidgets as a static library and not a shared library just to limit the
number of things that can go wrong. What is also very important is to build both a Debug and Release version of the
library. If you don't do that it's possible that your application will try to build against the wrong version and
you'll end up with linking errors. Alternatively make sure you stick to building everything in Release or everything
in Debug mode. But in general developers tend to need both.
For instance if building with nmake the following steps should work. You need to run this from a Visual Studio
command prompt.
cd %WXWIN%\build\msw
nmake /f makefile.vc BUILD=debug
nmake /f makefile.vc BUILD=release
After performing these steps you should have a series of libraries in %WXWIN%\lib\vc_x64_lib.
We can now build wxCharts itself.
While on Linux it is common to install software in /usr/local, there isn't a well defined equivalent on Windows. By
default CMake uses C:\Program Files but I don't find this very appropriate. So the following instructions will assume
you do want to install the wxCharts libraries somewhere else and show you how to do so. The first step is to choose a
directory where we want to install the wxCharts libraries, we will assume that location has been saved in the WXCHARTS
environment variable.
Now we can clone the wxCharts repository (in a directory different than WXCHARTS) and build the wxCharts library with
CMake. The following commands should work. They assume you use Visual Studio 2022 but other versions should work too,
just use the appropriate generator for the version of Visual Studio you are using. The list of generators can be found
here: https://cmake.org/cmake/help/latest/manual/cmake-generators.7.html.
git clone [email protected]:wxIshiko/wxCharts.git
cd wxCharts
mkdir build
cd build
cmake -G "Visual Studio 17 2022" -A x64 -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=%WXCHARTS% ..
cmake --build . --config Debug
cmake --build . --config Release
cmake --install . --config Debug
cmake --install . --config Release
At the end of these steps you should have the header files in %WXCHARTS%\include\wxcharts and the libraries in
%WXCHARTS%\lib. wxCharts follows the wxWidgets convention of appending a 'd' suffix to the Debug versions so there
should be a wxcharts.lib file and a wxchartsd.lib file.
Of note are also the files in %WXCHARTS%\lib\cmake. These are CMake configuration files and they are necessary to
make the find_package(wxCharts CONFIG) command work. That command is used by applications that use CMake as their
build system and want to use wxCharts. The examples shipped with wxCharts fall in that category and we will now show
how to build one of them.
We will now verify the correct installation by building and running the wxLineChart sample.
The following commands should work. Note the use of -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=%WXCHARTS% to point CMake to the wxCharts
installation directory, more precisely to the %WXCHARTS%\lib\cmake that we discussed earlier.
cd ..
cd samples/linechart
cmake -G "Visual Studio 17 2022" -A x64 -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=%WXCHARTS% .
cmake --build . --config Debug
cmake --build . --config Release
This should have successfully built the linechart.exe executable for the release version and the linechartd.exe
executable for the debug version. Running any of them should display a windows with a line chart.