I'm wanting to make something like a tab control, but without visible tabs at the top.
I would prefer to have the tabs selected from a list or tree at the left hand side of the page, something like this...
Selecting the list/tree item at the left changes everything on the right-hand side of the dialog.
I know I could do this by individually showing/hiding all the fields on the RHS, depending on the selected view, but this is unmanageable to design, when there are at least 10 different designs. C++ doesn't let me design groups and make them visible/invisible in one go. I would prefer to design them as totally separate dialog resources, and then bring them in, like a tab control.
I believe Windows Forms has a ContentControl, which is like a tab control without the tabs, which sounds perfect, but MFC doesn't seem to have this.
Is there a way to do this nicely? Or maybe even a 3rd party control to handle it?
In MFC you would do this by making a child modeless dialog for each group. For each dialog turn off the titlebar style and border style and it will blend in to the parent window instead of looking like a dialog. Create all the dialogs, then use ShowWindow to show/hide one at a time.
Minor detail: Put an invisible control (like a group box) on the parent window to serve as a landmark. When you create each dialog use MoveWindow to position and size it on the landmark.
Use window style WS_EX_CONTROLPARENT in the parent window to help with tab key navigation from parent to child.
Yes you can using DIALOG resources. Set the DIALOG Style to Child, Border to None, Title Bar to False. You can then add implementation classes/files for each DIALOG. The dialogs are then inserted/removed to and fro the parent as a child components by setting the containing window as the dialog's parent (i.e., SetParent)
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Using C++, I am making a Tic-Tac-Toe game using the Win32 API. To mark a square (X or O) I want the player to click the square which then changes to an X or O.
What I am doing right now is having a button click event which turns a static text box to X or O. However, when I place the button on top of the text box and make it not visible, I can't click it.
What I really need is an invisible button that still functions. So it's not set WS_VISIBLE, but you can still click it.
Is this possible or is there another way around this problem?
I can see a couple of reasonable possibilities here.
The first and most obvious would be to skip using a button at all, and just have the underlying window process the WM_LBUTTONDOWN message, and set the "X" or "O" in the correct location. For this, you don't even need static controls -- you can just detect the mouse clicks directly on the parent window, and draw your "X" or "O" in the corresponding square.
Another possibility would be a button that's marked as "visible", but happens to be transparent. IMO, this is a fairly poor choice though. To do it, you'd need to either create a transparent button control on your own, or subclass a button control to disable its drawing.
At least IMO, the obvious route would be to skip using the static control at all. Instead, just use the buttons directly -- a button normally has a caption. Start with that caption as an empty string. When the button is clicked, change its caption to "X" or "O" as appropriate. It should probably also disable itself in response to the button click, so clicking it again won't have any further effect.
There's no way to make an invisible button that still functions. Imagine all of the ways that could be abused if it were possible! Not to mention how confusing to have invisible, yet functional, UI.
What Mark Ransom posted is exactly right: you need to get your existing control to respond to mouse click events, just like a button does. Then you can do whatever you want in response to clicks. You don't need a button just to be clickable.
You say that you have a "static text box", but I'm not really sure what that is. There are text boxes (which are not static), and then there are static controls (which can display text). I'm going to assume that you have the latter.
In that case, you don't need to handle the WM_LBUTTONDOWN and WM_LBUTTONUP messages directly, which would require that you subclass the control. Although that's probably the best approach design-wise (separation of responsibilities and all that), it's also a lot more trouble.
Instead, you can handle the click events from the parent's window procedure by setting the SS_NOTIFY style for your static control (you can do this either in the Dialog Editor or in your call to CreateWindow, depending on how you create the control). This causes the control to notify its parent in four cases: when it is clicked (STN_CLICKED), when it is double-clicked (STN_DBLCLK), when it is enabled (STN_ENABLE), and when it is disabled (STN_DISABLE).
So at the parent, you need to process WM_COMMAND messages. The message you're looking for will have a HIWORD(wParam) of STN_CLICKED (indicating that a static control with the SS_NOTIFY style has been clicked), a LOWORD(wParam) corresponding to your static control's ID (set either in the Dialog Editor or specified as the hMenu parameter in your call to CreateWindow), and an lParam containing a handle to your static control.
If you use SW_HIDE, it doesn't just make the window invisible but makes it behave like that too. What you really wanted is probably just make the button transparent. I never did that, you may find this or this helpful.
You may just scrap the textbox just use the button, i mean a button-looking checkbox with ownerdraw or bitmaps. Or scrapping the button and handle the mouse events Like Mark suggests.
My application uses stacked dialogs to select between options in several places. For example, the dialog box below uses two stacked dialogs:
To choose between "shooting methods", the user selects from the drop-down list in the bottom right. This changes a child dialog box above it.
The "advanced options" box (located in the child dialog box) selects between a simplified interface and a more complete one.
In each case, the stacked dialog box is implemented using a picture object as a placeholder in the parent dialog. When a page is selected, SetWindowPos is called to move/resize the child dialog (pNewPage) to fit the placeholder.
// Show the newly selected page
pNewPage->ShowWindow (SW_SHOW) ;
pNewPage->SetFocus () ;
// Position the newly selected page
CRect rcDlgArea ;
GetDlgItem (IDC_DLG_AREA)->GetWindowRect (&rcDlgArea) ;
ScreenToClient (&rcDlgArea) ;
pNewPage->SetWindowPos (this,
rcDlgArea.left, rcDlgArea.top, rcDlgArea.Width (), rcDlgArea.Height (),
SWP_NOACTIVATE) ;
This has worked very well up until now, but one of my users in Germany is having a problem I can't explain. When he opens the tool, the stacked page comes up looking like this:
Note that the child dialogs are stretched so that the text in the child dialog appears larger than the text in the parent.
Other than the visual layout issues, the child dialog also seems to "cover" the selection drop-down in the bottom right (located in the parent dialog). Although the drop-down is still visible, CBN_SELCHANGE messages are not received when the drop-down list is clicked.
I am at a loss to explain why the child dialog boxes are being rescaled. As you can see above, I've tried to be very explicit about the resizing of the dialog box, but this doesn't seem to work.
Can anyone think of a reason why the child dialog might be rescaled on some systems but not on others? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you,
Michael
Seems like this user has larger fonts selected than what is used in the first screenshot. Note that dialog sizes are specified in DLU's, which scale with the size the user has selected for the font. You can either scale your dialog explicitly, in pixels (bad solution, this will make your app look even worse on some configurations), or do your calculations in DLU's everywhere. Your second screenshot also seems to show that the child dialogs use a different font than those of the wizard. I'm not sure why that is, I guess it's something in the window styles you pass to the wizard when you create it.
I have a modeless CDialog that contains controls, some CButtons and a CScrollbar. The CDialog is parented off of an edit box that I want to keep focus at all times. The problem is that whenever the user uses the controls, clicking a button or on the scrollbar, the control steals focus from the edit box, causing both the parent window to draw without focus (grayed-out header bar), and causing the control to take all the keyboard input. Is there a way for the controls to respond to mouse actions but not steal focus?
The controls and the dialog are all created with WS_CHILD. The controls are parented off the dialog, and the dialog is parented off of the edit box.
I've tried setting focus back after the controls are used, but that causes the parent window to flicker as it loses and then regains focus. Basically I want something that works like a combo box, where the scroll bar can be clicked or dragged around, but keyboard input still goes to the dialog itself, not just the scroll bar, and the whole thing never loses focus.
I haven't done anything like this for a long time, so I'm sure there are a million little details, but I think the starting point is to override the handling of WM_MOUSEACTIVATE.
I am a little confused about child-parent relationship you described.
Can you explain what do you mean by:
The CDialog is parented off of an edit box that I want to keep focus at all times
Any window hosting other windows inside of the client area is a parent of those windows. It is impossible to create window without WS_CHILD that is contained by other window.
Therefore all dialog’s controls are children of this dialog. It is also possible that child window hosts another child window.
CDialog is just an MFC representation of a dialog window; the same applies to other controls. For example CButton is an MFC class that wraps handle of the window’s window that is predefined as window button control.
Dialog never has focus unless is empty (does not have any controls). If dialog contains even one control, this control always has focus.
What focus means is that any given window receives mouse and keyboard messages. Only one control can have focus at any given time. In order for scroll bar to process mouse click or keyboard to move slider, scroll bar must have focus; therefore some other control must give it up.
Combo box drop box (I think this is what you are referring to) is not a child of the dialog. It is a popup window that for the duration has keyboard focus and captures mouse. When it drops down, dialog is deactivated and once dropdown hides, dialog state is changed back to active hence focus never changes, it returns to the control that had focus when dialog was deactivated.
What you are trying to do is probably possible but it would require a lot of coding. Probably hooking messages would do the job but I think it would be going against the stream.
I have one MFC application (exe) that contains two panes in its main UI. This application loads another DLL that also contains one dialog. How can I programatically place a Dialog defined into the DLL, and put it into (within) the pane of the MFC application? The question is not how to programatically retrieve the dialog from the DLL but how to put this dialog 'on the top' (within, inside) of one UI pane that belongs to the application?
My goal is to customize the UI of the application with dialog(s) retrieved from a dll and give the user the feeling that these dialogs all belong to one application UI. Thanks for any hint.
I have some applications with this feature, often with a tab control to alternate between windows.
First I set a frame in the container window, invisible to the user. The frame is just a placeholder to where the dialog window will be.
Then I make an instance of the dialog window as a global variable in the container class, I create the dialog window as a modeless window (using Create(), not DoModal()), move the window to the same RECT of the frame control, and call ShowWindow() to show the window.
Am I understanding you correctly that you don't want the dialogs to appear as dialogs, but rather as content of another window, or as a pane?
In other words, you want to get rid of the dialog's title bar and embed the dialog's content into another window, is that right?
That is possible. You would need to create the dialog without the title bar (change the window style) and make sure that you create the dialog's window as a childwindow of the window where you want the content to go. I can explain this further but I first would like to know if I'm understanding you correctly.
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.