Is it possible to add custom controls to a console window? You can use GetConsoleWindow() to get the window's handle, and then add your own menu items or consume all its events. I can't find any examples of people adding extra controls though.
I am developing a small, high performance serial terminal app. It is a console application - RichTextBox is too slow and has issues that make it unsuitable for VT100 terminal emulation.
I want to add some little graphics to show the state of the serial control lines (RTS/CTS/DTR/RI etc.) and perhaps a capture on/off toggle button. Ideally I'd like to add them to the window title bar. Bitmaps are all that are required.
After lots of research I found that it isn't easy, or even possible really.
You can add controls to the window with CreateWindow(), but of course only in the client area which is taken up entirely by the console text box. However, you can at least create floating controls that way, which hover over the text to provide status info etc.
You can put controls in the window borders but only with some hacking on XP or a new API that was introduced with Vista. The problem with this API is that it requires you to draw your own program icon and title text, and the console window doesn't seem to cope with it very well.
You can't add your own menu items because the console window doesn't pass the messages.
In the end I used the function keys for everything and gave a status indication by changing the console window icon.
Related
Are notification/alert windows (that appear above the Windows System Tray) like the examples below just a standard window, owner drawn HMENU's or are they implemented using NOTIFYICONDATA? Note: I know that the actual system tray icon is implemented using NOTIFYICONDATA, but are the notification windows also implemented using this structure?
In my WinAPI C++ application I want to show a similar notification where it will appear above the system tray icon, have buttons, horizontal scroll bars and etc. I know I can just create a new HWND, position it above the system tray and show that but if there is a specific WinAPI 'System Tray Notification' class/function I would prefer to use that, thus my question.
Are notification/alert windows (that appear above the Windows System Tray) like the examples below just a standard window, owner drawn HMENU's or are they implemented using NOTIFYICONDATA?
These are custom dialogs displayed when needed. They are not implemented using NOTIFYICONDATA. You can use Shell_NotifyIconGetRect() to get the current location of your tray icon when needed.
Tray notifications are all about notifying the process that owns the icon that a click event has occurred so it can then do its thing, whatever that may be.
There is no specialised mechanism or framework for anything GUI related in this case.
Best Practices: When a user right-clicks the icon, it should
bring up a normal shortcut menu. However, the result of a single
click with the left mouse button will vary with the function of the
icon. It should display what the user would expect to see in the form
best suited to that content—a popup window, a dialog box or the program
window itself. For instance, it could show status text for a status icon,
or a slider for the volume control.
I am currently developing a user interface DLL that uses the WIN32 API. The DLL must work for numerous platforms, XP, WIN CE, etc. I have managed to incorporate docking, anchoring and so on but appear to have a problem regarding owner-drawn buttons. I can draw the button's correct state, focus, clicked, default. However, I cannot receive key notifications. I specifically want to perform a click operation on a button that currently has focus, should the user press enter.
Note that I am using a windows message loop rather than a dialog message loop. I use windows hooks to hook into the window creation and set the user data to 'point' to my control instance. If I test for WM_KEYDOWN in the main message loop I can get a handle to my button control instance and could forward the message to the relevant control. Unfortunately, I am dealing with a lot of legacy code and this may not be an ideal solution.
So, my question is what is the best way forward. Is subclassing the button control's window procedure a viable option or is there an easier way?
Many thanks in advance.
The comments above are correct. The button with focus should be getting the key messages. But buttons don't (by themselves) respond to Enter--they respond to Space. It sounds like what you're missing is the typical dialog keyboard navigation, like Tab key moving the focus and Enter activating the "default" button.
If you've got a typical Windows message pump, and you want the keyboard behavior normally associated with dialogs, then you need to use the IsDialogMessage API in your message loop. This means your window is essentially a "modeless dialog".
Looks like standard window proc subclassing should do the trick. See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms633591(v=vs.85).aspx for details.
I am developing an application for Windows 7 devices and I'm using an embedded web browser (webkit). Normally touching an edit control on a tablet device causes a little keyboard icon to appear. However, since my edit control is in the browser, it's not a real window with an hwnd and Window's doesn't bring up the icon you can click on to bring up the on screen keyboard.
Is there an API I can use to cause the little keyboard icon to appear as it normally would when focus goes to an edit control?
I tried searching MSDN, no success.
I looked at the Windows keyboard API. No dice.
I tried running OSK.exe. This could bring up multiple instances of the keyboard and it's just sloppy. I want to get the same effect a user would get when tapping a windows edit control so the UI is consistent.
There must be an API that can bring up that on screen keyboard.
Thanks.
David
Not sure if you have this answered already. I have been looking at doing a similar thing although it is a part of a larger application and the keyboard is rarely used (but nevertheless had to be supported). I assigned a shortcut key (right click Win 7 on screen keyboard application and choose Properties. In the shortcut tab, assign any shortcut you'd like). When I touch a SurfaceTextEdit control, I emulate the shortcut key from my C++ code using SendInput(). I know this is a hack, but it worked well for me because I rarely used the onscreen keyboard in my application.
I have a dynamically created toolbar on a plain Win32 dialog. My buttons are added with & shortcuts which correctly puts underscore to characters following ampersand but pressing Alt+(char) causes a beep and the button is not clicked.
It has been a while since I have done Win32 API development. Is there something that needs to be done to a dynamically created child window (toolbar) in order for the accelerator keys to work?
This could be something really obvious that I am missing...
Well... You have to write code to handle these keypresses and convert them into WM_COMMAND messages. The traditional way to do this is to define an accelerator table and process them using TranslateAccelerator() - but of course, you're free to do it however you like... Just make sure the keys you handle jibe with the keys you underline!
You might also find this KB article helpful: How to use accelerator keys within a modal dialog box in Visual C++... Or, for a more in-depth (and MFC-free) look at implementing custom message processing in dialogs, check out Raymond Chen's articles on the dialog manager, specifically part 4: The dialog loop and part 9: Custom accelerators in dialog boxes (but seriously, read the whole thing, you know you want to...)
The beep indicates that the command isn't handled by any window in your app.
Since you created the toolbar dynamically, I would guess that the toolbar window isn't set up properly as a child window of your main window (i.e., it's parent and owner window are not set).
To test: click on the toolbar so it has the focus, then press Alt- and it should work.
I need to create an application which do the following:
At the beginning we have notepad window open with a lot of text in it.
Our application must scroll through this file and take notepad window screenshot after each scroll action.
I've tried to achieve this using SBM_GETRANGE, SBM_GETRANGE, SBM_SETPOS but it does not work for me.
Please note that emulating keyboard events (e.g. PageDown, PageUp) is not an option for me because this application should also work with other applications which may not support keyboard shortcuts for manipulating scrolls.
Thanks.
Don't try to manipulate the scrollbar directly - instead SetFocus() to the text window, then send Page Down messages. If there are applications where you must manipulate the scrollbar, you should get its window handle and send the messages there.