CMFCMenuBar and TestStack.White win.MenuBar is null - mfc

I'm trying to use TestStack.White to Automated an MFC Application (for UI testing purposes)
When using TestStack.White with an MFC Application written with CMFCMenuBar (the later Docking framework MFC) I noticed that code like the following fails due to window.MenuBar being null
var menu = window.MenuBar.MenuItem("Window");
menu.Click();
I know I can overcome this issue with the following
TestStack.White.UIItems.MenuItems.Menu windowMenu = win.Get<TestStack.White.UIItems.MenuItems.Menu(SearchCriteria.ByText("Window"));
windowMenu.Click();
But what I really want to do is get the ChildMenus so that I can check the list of windows open in the window menu, but the windowMenu.ChildMenus is empty
I am pretty sure this is because the menu is really a toolbar/toolstrip (dockable)
Does anyone know how to get the menu items (Tile,Cascale,Window1....) from the Window Menu
Has anyone else seen this issue or found a work around?
Thanks in advance
Paul

Yes, the MFC feature pack menu is really a toolbar with buttons. And it is fulfilled using a different process compared to the old style menu.
In your CFrameWndEx derived class, for getting the menu bar you can do:
CMFCMenuBar *pMenuBar= m_Impl.GetMenuBar();
Then it depends on what to do with it. For example, if you want to get the CMenu object that constitutes the menu bar you can do:
CMenu* pMenu= pMenuBar->GetMenu();
If you want to remove some of the menus, you can do (Notice the reverse order):
pMenuBar->RemoveButton(4);
pMenuBar->RemoveButton(3);
You can not get the menu the typical way by YourCFrameWndExDerivedClass::GetMenu() because these new MFC Feature Pack classes intentionally do SetMenu(NULL) when initializing the main frame, as you can see in the call stack:
I am not absolutely sure, but I think you won't also be able to do the override YourCFrameWndExDerivedClass::OnInitMenu() as you could in the old style menus. But you can still use the YourCFrameWndExDerivedClass::OnInitMenuPopup() overrride.

Related

MFC dialog-based app with tab control - Visual Studio bugs/restrictions make recommended path impossible?

Create a dialog-based application in Visual Studio 2019. Insert a new dialog in the resources. Place a control (or two) on that dialog that you will later (try to) hook up to a variable (e.g. an edit box to enter your name).
Prepare to add that control variable by creating a class for this second dialog. If you inherit from CDialogEx (or perhaps other classes too - not tested), you can go on to add a variable for the control you added - easy, normal.
But if you had the "tab control" context from the title above in your mind, and chose to inherit from CMFCPropertyPage instead, can you add a variable subsequently? No you cannot - the class added makes no reference to the ID of the dialog resource, and so the Add Variable process has no basis to find a class to add the variable to.
I think this is a bug in Visual Studio... but I'm not 100% sure because I have always found the documentation around property sheets and property pages somewhat confusing. Specifically:
Do the classes implementing the tabs contents on a tab control "contain" the controls "on" the tab... or is the tab control really just a way to provide visual cues to show/hide sets of controls, and all of those controls and associated variables reside in one class?
I believe it's intended to be the former, but I can imagine that one uses a tab control because there are strong similarities between tab contents, and therefore potential benefits in implementing all the control variables in one place so as to avoid duplication. I just wish it was stated explicitly somewhere what the intention was.
Wider context: I'm trying to implement a dialog-based app with a tab control dominating that dialog. MS documentation says to implement a tab control using CPropertySheet and CPropertyPage to implement the tabbed dialog and tab contents. However, there is no (direct) way to create a dialog-based application whose main dialog inherits from CPropertySheet. When you look for examples of tab controls at the application level, you readily find things that deviate from the documented path considerably - using neither CPropertySheet nor CPropertyPage and using the WM_LBUTTONDOWN event instead of TCN_SELCHANGE, both without obvious reasons.
Any tips on (a) how to repair the apparent Visual Studio bug and/or (b) how to inherit from CPropertySheet for my application dialog and/or (c) where to find a clearer and more conventional example of tab control use at the top level would be greatly appreciated.
Given that there appears to be no clear and consistent way of approaching this, if (like me) you think "how hard can it be?", you might naively set out to see if you can create a new dialog-based application based on CDialog and manually convert it to CPropertyPage. You might fare better; I quickly hit a weird problem with the app compiling but not running - it could not load the window caption from the resource ID, despite the caption literally being there in black and white. Due to the weirdness, this was a red flag, and so to my mind problem (b) seems to be not worth the effort.
Without a CPropertySheet at the top level, there is no point having any kind of CPropertyPage or CMFCPropertyPage involved, making problem (a) pointless. That said, if you manually convert from (default) CDialogEx to CPropertyPage for your tab classes, it seems to have no problem compiling and running - the tabs just don't have any functionality that integrates with the main dialog.
Instead, I can now recommend working through the details of the video example even though it does strange things at first glance. You can achieve the desired result in more or less the same way as follows:
Use plain CDialogEx throughout, and so provide all the tab switching/showing/hiding/control work yourself (which the example demonstrates).
Create your main dialog and all tabs in the resource editor, adding the CDialog-based classes from there.
If you create your tab dialog resources via Insert Dialog (generic) instead of Add Resource (uses specific templates) then you will have to manually set certain dialog properties for each tab:
Border: Thin (or I preferred None)
Style: Child
System Menu: false
Title Bar: false
You can simplify the repositioning of the tabs (see below; it barely justifies the separate SetRectangle() function)
You should (probably) drive the tab changing from the TCN_SELCHANGE event instead of WM_LBUTTONDOWN
As noted, repositioning the tabs can be simplified to something like:
CRect tabRect;
m_tabControl.GetWindowRect( &tabRect );
for ( int i = 0; i < m_totalTabs; i++ )
{
m_pTabPage[ i ]->SetWindowPos( &wndTop, tabRect.left, tabRect.top, 0, 0,
i == m_currentTab? SWP_NOSIZE|SWP_SHOWWINDOW : SWP_NOSIZE|SWP_HIDEWINDOW );
}
Additional calls to ShowWindow() for each tab shown in the example are redundant.
One time, I had made on application as such. I don't remember if I used the Visual Studio new project wizard. Most probably, I did. But I will assist you on how to do it if you can not reach how to do it via the assistant.
The essential things:
Define the main dialog in the resources and the respective class in its H and CPP files.
In the YourAppClass::InitInstance you will need to have something like:
YourMainDlgClass dlg;
m_pMainWnd = &dlg;
INT_PTR nResponse = dlg.DoModal();
if (nResponse == IDOK)
{
// TODO: Place code here to handle when the dialog is
// dismissed with OK
}
else if (nResponse == IDCANCEL)
{
// TODO: Place code here to handle when the dialog is
// dismissed with Cancel
}
else if (nResponse == -1)
{
TRACE(traceAppMsg, 0, "Warning: dialog creation failed, so application is terminating unexpectedly.\n");
TRACE(traceAppMsg, 0, "Warning: if you are using MFC controls on the dialog, you cannot #define _AFX_NO_MFC_CONTROLS_IN_DIALOGS.\n");
}
Insert a CMFCTabCtrl element in your dialog for tabs, instead of using a CPropertySheet.

How to hide/collapse main menu in a win32/mfc application

I always been interested on how we can accomplish this (hide/show the main menu using the alt key), and now some applications do this very often. One that really please me is the visual studio 2010 with this plugin:
http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/bdbcffca-32a6-4034-8e89-c31b86ad4813?SRC=VSIDE
(firefox also do this, but i think that is in a different way)
Can anyone explain me how this can be achieved or if you known of any sample project that demonstrate this please tell me.
(what i can see in some replies here in stack is that we have to destroy the menu when is to hide and create it when is to show?! but this seems a bit bad solution...)
Thanks
The SetMenu function lets you add/remove the menu from the window. It does not destroy the menu.
Note that most applications which have the dynamic menu hide/show behavior are not really showing a menu. They're showing a custom control that looks like a menu.
You might also take a look at MFC support for auto hiding menus. I used this technique and it worked really well.
in CMainFrame::OnCreate I did
m_wndMenuBar.ShowWindow(SW_HIDE);
which actually works fine in our project
I stumbled across a related pit fall that will show a hidden main frame without your consent:
Whenever the focus for a child window in an MDI application changes (e.g. due to right clicking in it), the function CMDIChildWnd::OnMDIActivate will be called, which in turn shows the main menu (even if it was removed or destroyed previously) of the MDI application.
This works basically by adding the saved main manu from the underlying's CMDIChildWnd m_hMenuShared variable.
A quick&dirty hack to prevent this, is setting m_hMenuShared to NULL (it's protected in CMDIChildWnd so this needs a custom derived child class of CMDIChildWnd) for all child frames.

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.

Extend an external application's menu

I am currently writing a plugin for a third party application.
As the plugin framework does not provide any way to access the UI I am now trying to do this manually via the WinAPI.
More specifically, I want to add a custom menu item for my plugin in the "File" menu.
My first attempt using FindWindow to retrieve the handle of the main window and the using GetMenu was not successful, as GetMenu simply returned NULL.
My next step was to use EnumChildWindows and search for a child having the text "&File" (I really don't like this approach as it makes localization quite terrible). However, I only found out the handle of the menu item, but I need the corresponding HMENU to use AppendMenu then, don't I?
Simply casting does not work and results in an "Invalid menu handle".
Is it actually possible to achieve what I am trying? How?
Thanks for your ideas in advance!
It more than likely just isn't a HMENU. Custom menu implementations are common, the one Window provides is dated and inflexible. Compare to Windows Forms' MenuStrip for example.
Of course, that blows a gaping hole in your approach.

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;
}