Disabling menu compression in MFC - mfc

My English is not perfect. I am using Visual C++ 2019 and MFC. At my MDI-program, the menus are compressed: I do not see all the items, there is a double-arrow-like something on bottom of the menu, I always must click to them. I can not disable this. At Resource View, I can not open the whole menu's Properties Page, only for the File, etc. menu's Properties Page. I did not find the disabling on the Properties Page. In the code, in MainFrm.cpp, CBRS_SIZE_DYNAMIC and CBRS_FLYBY occur 2+2 times. I tried to put to comment them, but this did not solve the problem. How can I disable the compression? Thank you.
I can not open Properties Page of the whole menu. Maybe it has not Properties Page, or the cause is the lack of High DPI support in Visual Studio. For example, I can not edit icons: the icon editor is unusable. At the generated program, it seems the High DPI support of toolbar is depend on the style. At WinAPI programs, there are 3 pixel stairs: emulates 1/3 resolution. There is 3*96 dpi = 288 dpi at me, 0,16 mm * 3 = 0,48 mm.

Use CMFCMenuBar::SetShowAllCommands
Remarks
If a menu does not display all the menu commands, it hides the commands that are rarely used.

Whether the application should display all menu items or just the most recently used ones (and the user will have to expand the rest) is an option that can be set by the user: Toolbar Options->Add or Remove Buttons->Customize->Options->Personalized Menus and Toolbars->Menus show recently used commands first. This option is saved in the registry under HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\CompanyName\ApplicationName\Workspace\MFCToolBarParameters\RecentlyUsedMenus, so the application "remembers" it.
Programmatically it can be changed using the CMFCMenuBar::SetRecentlyUsedMenus() function - it's a static function.
It would be best to let the user decide how the application should work, so I would recommend that you do... nothing about it. Or, you could set it to FALSE, but only for the very first time the application is run. Add a new boolean value in the registry, under ...ApplicationName\Workspace or ...ApplicationName\Settings, with a value always set to TRUE. The best place to do this is the SaveCustomState() member function of your application class. In the LoadCustomState() read that value (default FALSE), and if it is TRUE call CMFCMenuBar::SetRecentlyUsedMenus(FALSE);.

Related

Windows 10 - Taskbar - Add item to context menu for each program

I need a context menu entry for each program in the taskbar. Want to add an entry which immediately terminates (UNIX/Linux-like signal SIGKILL) the process. There a lot of questions on this site, how it's done for the explorer or desktop. But is it also possible to add such an option to the context menu of the taskbar?
To clarify the question, according to my comments:
The current problem:
I have a program (not Firefox) which randomly crashes. The program is in fullscreen mode. But if I want to close the window of the program with Exit window, it takes a long time that Windows kill the program. When I try to open the Task Manager the program immediately grabs the user input and I have no chance to interact with the Task Manager. So my solution was to add a context menu item in the taskbar to quit the task of the program. According to a user comment, I test the option "Always on top" in the Task Manager. Didn't know that. But I haven't tried it yet. I'm also interested for further projects, if there is a function in WINAPI or Windows Registry to add an item.
To avoid down-votes:
I'm not interested to hack Windows or the application. Solutions with code injection are taboo for me. Want a clean solution, if even possible. I want improve my Windows version. Adding also some additional information (process information) in the context menu.
Have currently found this (Registering shell extension handlers).
Has anybody used this before? I think it's sound promising.
There is no API to extend this menu like that. Applications can customize the top of the menu with ICustomDestinationList but there is no way to add entries for all applications.
For a personal use project, you could inject a .dll in the taskbar instance of Explorer.exe and add your item after figuring out the address of the function where the menu is created. This address can of course change after you upgrade Windows so it is not a very generic solution. Using the public symbols might help but you still have to expect it to break from time to time when Microsoft changes part of their taskbar code.
You don't need to change code in explorer.exe, because you can close a program by doing the keyboard shortcut: Alt + F4.

Changing program icon dynamically

In C++, is there anyway to let the user chose the icon of the app? For example, Winamp lets you select which icon you wish to use from a list of icons in it's preferences. How is it done?
There is the icon that you see in explorer. This is a resource in your executable. You could change that, but I wouldn't advise you too. Virus scanners can get nervous if executables are modified, and in Windows Vista you will not even be allowed to write in the Program Files folder.
But the icon that is displayed on the task bar or in the system tray can be changed. This is actually the icon of your application window and it can be set by sending a WM_SETICON message.
And there are shortcuts. They can be changed too, and in a shortcut you can specify which icon should be used.
I found a discussion on changing icons that has information about the first two options.
For Visual Studio 2010 in an MFC dialog based app
A. In the resource view, rightclick Icon folder and add icon. Give it an ID like IDI_MYICON. Leave it as is or draw something nice.
B. Go to OnInitDialog. Add the following two lines of code:
HICON hMyIcon = LoadIcon( AfxGetInstanceHandle(), MAKEINTRESOURCE(IDI_MYICON) );
SetIcon( hMyIcon, FALSE ); // FALSE == use as small icon
You can read about these functions in the help to understand what is happening.
This sets the icon as icon for the sysmenu (topleft) and in the taskbar. This is however not automatically reflected in all situations. E.g. for a systray icon you need to explicitly specify the icon again in the call to Shell_NotifyIcon().

Visual Studio MFC Toolbar Editor icon order won't update

I've been trying to create a custom toolbar in a MFC project in Visual Studio 2010. I've been following the Sketcher tutorial in Ivan Horton's Beginning Visual C++ 2010. The problem I'm running into is that the toolbar doesn't update to reflect the order and spacing of icons I have created.
I've created a small screenshot to demonstrate the problem:
In the background is the visual studio toolbar editor with my desired toolbar configuration. In the foreground is the actual app, which does not reflect the spacing or order of icons I've designed. It does reflect NEW icons being added, and the icons work fine, but I just can't seem to get them to re-order or appropriately space themselves. They just append to the end in whatever order I create them.
I've tried the rudimentary techniques of restarting both VS and windows, but to no avail.
Any tips on getting it to play nicely? Lacking that, is there somewhere to manually view or edit the code generated by the toolbar editor?
For starters, if you create an MFC SDI/MDI project in VS.NET 2005, there is no such issue. It happens in VS.NET 2008 and 2010.
In fact, your rearrangement of the standard toolbar does takes effect. It's just not showing you the default state. To restore the state: click the small arrow button at the end of toolbar -> Add or Remove Buttons -> Standard -> Reset Toolbar.
Though I'm not 100% sure why it happens like this(design like this or a bug), there is a way to work around it and it works:
Add following code to the end of CMainFrame::LoadFrame(...)
BOOL CMainFrame::LoadFrame(UINT nIDResource, DWORD dwDefaultStyle, CWnd* pParentWnd, CCreateContext* pContext)
{
...
// Explicitly restore toolbar state
m_wndToolBar.RestoreOriginalstate();
return TRUE;
}
I recommend you to contact Microsoft support engineers as there's little resource on the web.
The reason could be that the toolbar state is already loaded from the registry whenever your application starts. So the framework reads the toolbar state and adds the new buttons to the end. Is there a Workspace key in your Registry and did you try to delete it anytime you make changes to the toolbar? The key should be at a location like HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\MyCompany\MyApp\Workspace
The values for MyCompany and MyApp are usually set in InitInstance. Always calling RestoreOriginalState() would break the code to allow user modifications to the toolbar.

Is it possible to change the location of the main top-level menu in an MFC MDI app?

I have an app with a customized frame (i.e., caption/titlebar, borders). I customized the frame by removing the WS_CAPTION style, and overriding OnNcCalcSize to reserve a custom-sized area for the caption, which the app paints in OnNcPaint.
A side effect is that the menu bar no longer displays, which is OK because I want to customize the appearance & location of the main menu. Unfortunately, I don't know how to do that. I would like the "File" menu to be further from the left edge than it is with the standard menu bar.
An acceptable alternative would be to remove the menu entirely, and use OnNcHitTest, OnNcPaint and OnNcMouseMove to manage a hand-coded replacement for the top-level menu.
I've never seen a way to modify the looks of the standard menu. You can remove it (remove the creation code from your InitInstance) and then code a replacement. I wouldn't do that in OnNcXXX though, rather make a new custom control that you position at the top. Or you could have a look at the MFC Next themed menus and write a custom UI renderer. It may be enough to override a few functions left and ride to set the alignment of the menu.
It's an MFC MDI app -- InitInstance is not where the menu is being created. I have tried to get rid of the menu (and succeeded, temporarily) but the MFC framework seems to be "putting it back" -- I think the MDI model has the child windows modify the menu, but the code that does that seems to be buried in the framework somewhere (or else I just haven't been able to find exactly where it happens in the application's code, but I suspect it's happening inside the MFC framework code). If I knew where, I might be able to override the methods(s) and take control... I think.
What would be the reason to write a custom control vs. handling OnNcMouseMove & OnNcLeftButtonDown, e.g.? I don't expect to need the functionality in any other app (a new app would be coded in C#, probably), so I'm looking for ease of implementation, not code reuse.

How to show available windows in the Window menu

I have a MFC MDI application that I've recently ported from VS2003 to VS2008, and at the same time moved from Stingray Objective Studio 2006 v2 to v10.1. On the previous versions of my application, if I had more than one view open, the Window menu would be populated by an enumerated list of available views, e.g. 1 MyViewA, 2 MyViewB etc... If I had a large number of views, I would also get a Windows... menu option to allow me to select a view. This no longer happens, which is breaking some of my GUI level regression tests. My guess is that this functionality was implemented by either CMDIFrameWnd or SECMDIFrameWnd but I couldn't find a reference to it in the documentation. Does anyone know how I can get this functionality back.
First thing I'd do is create a new MDI application with the ClassWizard and check if the functionality you're missing is present. If so, poke around and see if you can tell what's different. One place to look may be the menu resource for the main menu.
If there is no in-built functionality to provide what you need, you can dynamically build the menu with the following pseudocode:
foreach registered CDocumentTemplate
foreach document
foreach view
{
if (numberOfWindowMenuItems < 5)
{
Add menu item
}
else
{
Add "Windows..." menu item
break all loops;
}