How to make tab key work in C++ Win32 API - c++

Question

I am a noob for C++ Win32 API. I am trying to make a textbox (edit control). In the textbox, I want to make the tab key act as it would in notepad, i.e., it would advance the cursor to the next tab stop in a textbox. I made a simple edit control with some scrollbars, auto-scrolling and multiline styles. I want the tab key to advance the cursor to the next tab stop. But it doesn't happen. The tab key doesn't do anything, literally nothing. It acts as if it wasn't assigned to do any task inside an edit control.
If anyone knows how to do that, I would be really grateful to him.
Here's the full code which I used for creating an edit control :-
HWND hTb = CreateWindow
(
L"Edit", L"LOL",
WS_VISIBLE | WS_CHILD | ES_MULTILINE | ES_AUTOHSCROLL | ES_AUTOVSCROLL | WS_HSCROLL | WS_VSCROLL | ES_WANTRETURN | WS_TABSTOP,
0, 0, LOWORD (lp), HIWORD (lp),
hWnd, NULL, NULL, NULL
);
I am creating hTb in the WM_CREATE message of the WndProc. This edit control is just used for resizing it and nothing complicated. Here's the code :-
case WM_SIZE :
{
MoveWindow (hTb, 0, 0, LOWORD (lp), HIWORD (lp), TRUE);
break;
}
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Edit controls will not receive tabs if "the dialog manager" portion of Win32 is engaged. For a modeless dialog box, the way you will see dialog box semantics showing up in a window is if the application's main message loop is filtering messages with the API call IsDialogMessage. IsDialogMessage will reroute tab presses to the window rather than the focused control, in this case the edit box.
To fix the problem use a standard message loop. That is,
while (GetMessage(&msg, NULL, 0, 0))
{
TranslateMessage(&Msg);
DispatchMessage(&Msg);
}
not
while(GetMessage(&msg, NULL, 0, 0))
{
if (!IsDialogMessage(hwnd, &msg))
{
TranslateMessage(&msg);
DispatchMessage(&msg);
}
}
You can read more about the dialog manager on Raymond Chen's blog: here, here, and here