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.
Related
I have a c++ Win32 application with a node-based GUI where I create a dynamic combobox with CreateWindowEx when the user presses a certain key within the GUI. I want the user to be able to click outside of the combobox Rect in order to make the combobox disappear.
To do this, I'm currently destroying the combobox inside a WM_KILLFOCUS notification of its DlgProc (so any click outside of it destroys it). However, it seems that the WM_KILLFOCUS notification is sent anytime one of its child windows gains focus. For example, if I click in the combobox's edit text region, the combobox itself loses focus since that child gains focus. Given my setup, this causes the combobox to be removed when clicking within it's Rect.
How can I prevent this behavior? Basically I want to be able to detect when anything other than the combobox or its child windows gains focus, rather than simply detecting if the combobox itself loses focus.
You can determine, whether focus moves to a different control from inside the WM_KILLFOCUS handler. This message receives
[a] handle to the window that receives the keyboard focus.
through its wParam argument.
Use the CB_GETCOMBOBOXINFO message to retrieve a COMBOBOXINFO structure, that contains window handles to all contributing windows (hwndCombo, hwndItem, and hwndList). Comparing the wParam value to all of those window handles allows you to determine, whether focus moves inside the combo box or outside.
While this answers the question that was asked, the real solution would be to handle the CBN_KILLFOCUS notification instead. It is sent to the control parent when the combo box loses keyboard focus, ignoring focus change events internal to the combo box control.
Recently, I've got stuck over strange UI issue, found a solution, but still unsure about problem cause.
Preconditions:
MFC MDI application has 2 modeless dialogs opened, both has a child third-party grid and CToolTipCtrl. Dialog windows crosses each other borders (i.e. active dialog is overlapping part of inactive one). CToolTipCtrl is similar to example, the only tool set for tooltip is grid. Parent of tooltip is There is the corresponding dialog's grid, TTS_ALWAYSTIP style is set to allow tooltips on inactive dialog.
Issue:
When mouse is hovering on inactive dialog's grid, tooltip is appearing and inactive dialog is drawn over active one. In other words, inactive window is brought to top without activating. It's drawn completely, including caption, buttons, grid, etc.
I've checked Z-order and found that inactive dialog is still inactive, even when shown on top. No Z-order changed. Then I gathered message log using Spy++ for whole inactive dialog while tooltip is appearing and found no WM_ACTIVATE, WM_FOCUS, WM_MDIACTIVATE, etc. Then I performed search about how to bring window up without activating and logged SetWindowPos calls - the only calls are performed for CToolTipCtrl's window. So, no SetWindowPos for dialogs called. No BringToTop() called as well.
Solution
I've changed tooltip's parent window from dialog's grid to dialog itself - and that fixed problem. However, I still have no idea what was happened and why changing parent attribute matters.
Question
Could anyone give me a hint about what I'm missing? Maybe, tooltip causes repaint of grid, and that repaint has a bug causing repaint over active window, but I haven't found any proofs yet.
Haven't found something specific about tooltip's parent property in MSDN as well. Maybe, I have to read somenting about Windows GDI?
I want to make a window that has an icon on the taskbar, but does not have the option to be closed from there. I could simply intercept WM_CLOSE, but then a non-functional option still remains on the window's taskbar menu. There are other questions on stackoverflow pertaining to that method, but none that describe how to hide the option itself. How can I accomplish this?
The Taskbar button uses the same menu that is assigned to the window itself. There is no way to differentiate whether the menu is being invoked by clicking on the Taskbar versus clicking on the window (or even if it is being invoked by mouse or keyboard, for that matter). If you disable the "Close" item, the user would not be able to close the window at all. So just don't do it.
I am making an SDI MDF application that uses a frameview to provid the user with a set of controls (buttons, editboxes and such). The view also owns a set of CDialogs used to desplay aditional controls that can be can be shown or hidden via a tabcontrol and other means. Untill recently the dialogs have been staticly placed at creation to be in their proper location on the screen but I wanted to add a dialog that the user could move around but is still a child of the view. When I created a dialog with a caption and sysmenu that the user can move around the issue I am running into is that when the window is placed over another control owned by the view, (lets say a button) when the paint method is called on the button, it draws over the dialog. The dialog is still on top and the dialogs controls can still be interacted with but the button is drawn over them untill the dialog is repainted. I have tryed to change the clipchild and clipsiblings settings of the dialog and have been able to get the dialogs to properly clip eachother but can not seem to get the child dialog to properly clip the parent view controls. Does anyone have any ideas on what setting might fix this clipping issue.
I have a native C++ MFC app. It has a main window based on CWnd, and user action can create a modal dialog. While the dialog is active, I want the main window to disappear, the dialog to be visible, and the main window's icon to remain in the task bar.
How can I accomplish this?
If I hide the main window (ShowWindow(SW_HIDE)), the task bar icon disappears. If I minimize the main window (SW_MINIMIZE), the icon remains. However, since the dialog is owned by the main window, this also hides the dialog.
After the dialog is created, clicking on the task bar icon makes the dialog visible. Naturally, I do not want to require the user to do this.
Even if I insert ShowWindow(SW_SHOW) in the dialog's OnInit handler, the dialog remains not visible. Spy++ shows that its visible bit is set, though. Same is true if I add SetWindowActive to OnInit.
I am not interested in changing the UI design. While the dialog is active, the user interacts only with it, and is not interested in anything in the main window. Therefore, the main window should disappear.
Using Windows VS2005 under WinXP32.
Well, in the block of code where you create the dialog and show it modal, you can do whatever you want to the main window of your app (show/hide) as long as you make the desktop window the parent of your dialog. Usually, the constructor for CDialog and derivatives takes a default argument of NULL for the parent window in which the framework ends up substituting AfxGetMainWnd(). Instead pass CWnd::GetDesktopWindow() as the parent of your dialog and then you should probably be able to hide your main window. However, you still might have a problem with the taskbar--but I'll let someone else give hints since I know nothing offhand about it.
In OnInitDialog, add following codes
//Set windows size zero, the windows disappear.
MoveWindow(0,0,0,0);
//If you want it invisible on taskbar. add following codes.
DWORD dwStyle = GetWindowLong(GetSafeHwnd(), GWL_EXSTYLE);
dwStyle &=~WS_EX_APPWINDOW;
dwStyle |= WS_EX_TOOLWINDOW;
SetWindowLong(GetSafeHwnd(), GWL_EXSTYLE, dwStyle);
You're fighting the OS. A modal dialog, by definition, disables but does not hide the "main" (parent) window. If you wanted another window, make a second one, but don't tell the OS to treat it as a modal dialog over the first window.
Perhaps you can resize the main window to a really small size and always keep it behind the modal dialog.