I have a dialog box with a list box,slider and a button.
I tried to change the background color but I couldn't managed to change that, so i thought that if I add a "picture control" as a bitmap and put it in the background i will succed, but now the problem is that the "picture control" is on top of all the controls.
I tried to change the the tab control with Ctrl+d but it didn't change anything.
I also tried to use SetWindowPos to top or buttom but also it didn't change anything.
I noticed that if I click in the location of the button it's brought to the front as I want.
Is there any way to "click" all the controls at the begining? do i miss something in order to bring the control to the top?
If you need to change the background colour of the dialog box, you need to handle the WM_CTLCOLORDLG message and return the handle to a brush (if the brush is not a stock object, make sure you delete the brush after the dialog box is closed) -- or, you can process the WM_ERASEBKGND message and erase the background yourself.
I tried to change the the tab control with Ctrl+D but it didn't change anything. I also tried to use SetWindowPos to top or buttom but also it didn't change anything.
Ctrl+D does get you in reordering mode, however there is a more reliable way of checking. The dialog template is in text form in .RC file, where you can review the order of control with text editor and sort lines manually the way you wish. This will be the order of control creation and tab order as well. Sometimes it's even easier to reorder controls this way.
More to that, when your application is running, Spy++ SDK tool can enumerate windows and again it will give you window order for checking.
SetWindowPos with proper arguments changes Z-order of controls on runtime as well.
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().
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.
I am implementing drag and drop of button on windows application.During dragging I want to display some dragging effect. I think image of the button would be appropriate to display during dragging.
Also I think cursor should be changed during dragging.
My doubts are:
How to capture the image of button and display while dragging.
What type of cursor should be displayed during dragging.
Application is in C++, win32.
Drag image:
If it is a standard button control then you should be able to use WM_PRINT or WM_PRINTCLIENT to ask it to draw itself to a GDI HDC (i.e. into a bitmap that you then use as the drag-image).
Note that not all controls support those messages and some of them support them in slightly different ways. Sometimes you have to experiment a bit or have custom code-paths for different controls.
Another way is to draw the button yourself using the visual styles (themes) API, with a fallback on DrawFrameControl for when themes are disabled. But that is much more tedious than using WM_PRINT/WM_PRINTCLIENT if you don't need it.
Cursor:
Depends what the operation is doing, really. Note that you get the copy and move cursors for free with the shell drag object, if you want them. Sometimes it makes sense to use a custom cursor, though.
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 have an ATL application with a dialog containing a TAB control. The App uses a common controls manifest.
Under XP with visual styles, the tab control background is a different color than the dialog and the controls (mostly checkboxes), so it looks quite ugly.
Screenshot
How can I fix that?
There is - apparently - one thing to do to get tab control pages colored correctly using XP visual styles.
In the WM_INITDIALOG handler for each page, call the uxtheme API EnableThemeDialogTexture
With the ETDT_ENABLETAB flag this automatically changes the background color of the dialog and all its child controls to paint appropriately on a tab.
The dialog pages do not need any kind of transparent flag, or indeed any style bit set differently from previously. If you have overridden WM_ERASEBKGND or WM_CTLCOLORDLG in your pages DialogProc you will need to revert to default handling (return FALSE).
Here you could find answer to your question.
The check boxes will post WM_CTLCOLORBTN notifications to their parent. If, for the checkbox control IDs, the parent window's message handler returns the result of
GetStockObject(HOLLOW_BRUSH)
then the check boxes should be drawn with a transparent background, which should give you the look you want.