Ok, so my intention is to "prettify" a UI I'm working on. I'm familiar with using GDI+ to manually draw my controls but my target today is simply BitBlitting png's on my DC directly.
That works nice and fine with the main frame, a few buttons and perhaps some menus.
My question is - how would you skin something more complicated like a combobox, listview or more "dynamic" controls using such skins?
Thank you. My target platform is Windows and I'm using C++ with the wxWidgets framework.
To 'skin' an existing control you'll have to subclass the window and catch the draw messages.
roughly:
// Subclass the control
WNDPROC lpfnOldCtrlProc;
lpfnOldCtrlProc = (WNDPROC)SetWindowLong(ControlHwnd, GWL_WNDPROC,
(DWORD)WinSubClassFunc );
and in your WinSubClassFunc:
switch( message )
{
case WM_DRAWITEM: // owner-draw the item
However, if you want to fully 'skin' a control e.g. change all elements of a ComboBox (border, entrybox, dropdown button, droplist etc.) then this becomes really messy.
Personally, I find it is easier to create your own control from scratch than try to subclass an existing control which consists of multiple window items.
The above methods works fine for e.g. using a standard combobox with a droplist and subclass it to make it contain a droplist of colour bars.
Related
Since there is no way to deep customizing (a gradient background for example) win32 controls (such as buttons, menu items e.t.c) many people advise to create an own custom control.
And if I need a custom button I will use WM_MOUSEMOVE, WM_LBUTTONDOWN and a shadow buffer. I will draw all controls on the shadow buffer and then use BitBlt(hDC, ...) for my window.
But if I want to create a custom menu I must to foresee that menu can be drawn outside of the client area.
At first I need to mouse tracking outside of the client area. SetCapture(hWnd) seems to be a bad solution as it blocks mouse tracking for windows below.
Then I need to draw/erase items outside of my window. Erasing with InvalidateRect(NULL, NULL, TRUE/FALSE) seems to be a bad solution too as it cause of blinking.
What is the best approach to create custom menu with WinAPI?
Runtime menus that can appear anywhere on the screen can be shown with TrackPopupMenu() function. Create the menu with CreateMenu(), AppendMenu() etc, then show it with TrackPopupMenu().
I want to make my own scrollbars for a custom drawn plot, like this image, what would be the best way to go?
Scrollbars should:
Only be visible when mouse hover over it (with fade in/out)
Be a part of the x/y axis of the plot, like in the picture
Not have any arrow buttons, just the thumb Thinner than the normal scrollbars
Would you suggest to:
Create everything from scratch, handling paging, scrollwheel etc.
Try to inherit CScrollBar and do my own drawing?
From what I've read, it's not very easy to customize scrollbars in MFC, for example here)
First off, these have to be scrollbar (or other) controls, not window scrollbars (used for scrolling a window).
Second, the statement "it's not very easy to customize scrollbars in MFC", is only partially true. MFC is a "thin wrapper" of Windows API, so you should better refer to the documentation of the Windows scrollbar control.
Then there is the CScrollBar class, but took a short look, and indeed, it does not really offer anything more than the Windows scrollbar does. As for the sample in the link you posted is a new (custom) control (painting everything on its own), i.e. literally "from scratch", not inheriting anything from CScrollBar.
So, you have to look into the Windows scrollbar control, and what it offers. Did take a look, and saw few things. Unfortunately there seems to be no owner-draw functionality. You can process the WM_CTLCOLORSCROLLBAR message, but this only allows you to change colors.
And according to the documentation the background color only. This appears to be the only possible customization, apart from the SBM_ENABLE_ARROWS message, which can hide the arrows. And no fading effect. If these are enough to you, you could try the Windows/MFC scrollbar, otherwise try writing your own.
I want to write my own chart control which requires scrolling.
I found that there is a CScrollView but nothing like this for a control.
Other toolkits like Cocoa, QT or GTK offer me a base class where i can set a content view which is displayed in a viewport and saves me from writting all of the scrolling code.
The code for custom scrolling isn't that much. Create the scrollbars, write the message handlers and remember one rectangle for the current visible part.
I would just try it. If you have problems, we are here to help :-)
I'm trying to create a custom dropdown for a derivative of CComboBox. The dropdown will be a calendar control plus some 'hotspots', e.g.
So I figure the best way to achieve this is to have a simple CWnd-derived class which acts as the parent to the calendar control, and have it paint the hotspots itself.
The window needs to be a popup window - I think - rather than a child window so that it isn't clipped. But doing this causes the dialog (on which the combobox control is placed) to stop being the topmost (foreground?) window, leading to its frame being drawn differently:
alt text http://img693.imageshack.us/img693/3474/35148785.png
This spoils the illusion that the dropdown is part of the combobox since its acting more like a modal dialog at this point. Any suggestions on how I make the custom dropdown behave like the regular dropdown?
Are there any other pitfalls I need to watch out for, e.g. focus and mouse capture issues?
When you create your popup window, you need to specify its owner. Owned popup windows will activate their owner when you activate them. Not specifying an owner will cause your window to get activated, which causes the change in the owner you're seeing.
Yeah I had this problem once. A quick google makes me suspect I solved this by using CreateWindowEx() and specifying WS_EX_NOACTIVATE. I have some other code that achieves the same effect by making the window with WS_EX_TOOLWINDOW rather than as a popup window, but I'm not sure of why that was done that way, my intuition would say that making it a popup window would be the way to go.
You can find in the following links two sample project that put in the CComboBox dropdown window a CTreeCtrl or a CListCtrl controls ... similar, you can put whatever you need there. Here is the links:
Tree ComboBox Control
and
List ComboBox Control
I hope this help you.
I am creating a MFC application in which there is a skin library which handles the UI effect of rendering the controls (it gets called in oninitdialog). But, meanwhile, I have also the requirement of displaying an icon on the buttons. For this, I am marking the buttons as ownerdrawn=true, and able to display icon, but in this case, skin effect is not taking place on those buttons whose ownerdrawing is done by me. So, my question is, how do I ensure that a control gets ownedrawn by me, and also by any other library.
Call the default handler for OnPaint to make sure the skinning library has a chance to draw the button, then draw your own content over the top.
void OnPaint()
{
Default();
CClientDC dc(this);
// your painting code goes here
}
You don't need owner-draw to display icons in buttons !