In a view of my MFC application, I can select certain rectangular area with click & drag. But when user wants to select larger area than current screen, he can't do that because the view does not automatically scroll when mouse pointer is near bound of the client area.
How can I resolve this problem? Any reference would suffice.
Normally you only do this when the user has the mouse button held down. That being the case, you normally want to capture the mouse when the click. You'll then handle WM_MOUSEMOVE messages. In your case, you'll compare the current position of the mouse to the border of your window, and when it gets close enough (e.g., within 10 pixels) you start to scroll in that position.
I feel obliged to add that I'd control scrolling speed pretty carefully when you do this -- some programs scroll so far so fast that this becomes nearly unusable, because the moment you've gotten close to the edge of the window, you've already scrolled way past where you intended. Others tend toward the opposite: no matter what you do, they scroll so slowly that moving even a short distance seems like it takes forever.
I doubt there's an easy answer to getting the "right" speed. You do generally want a gradient, so as they get sort of close to the border, it scrolls slowly, and as they get closer, the scrolling gets faster. You still need to be fairly careful about the upper and lower bounds of that though, so they get a reasonable range of speeds, not just jumping from "oh, am I ever going to get there", directly to "whoa, back up, that's way too far already!".
Related
I searched, but most posts are just telling me what I already have, so below is basically my code right now:
DIKeyboard->Acquire();
DIMouse->Acquire();
DIMouse->GetDeviceState(sizeof(DIMOUSESTATE), &mouseCurrState);
DIKeyboard->GetDeviceState(sizeof(keyboardState),(LPVOID)&keyboardState);
MousePos.x += mouseCurrState.lX;
MousePos.y += mouseCurrState.lY;
Any post telling me how to get absolute position just says to use those last two lines. But my program is windowed, and the mouse can start anywhere on the screen.
i.e. If my mouse happens to be in the centre of my screen, that becomes position 0,0. I basically just want the top left of my window (not my screen) to be my 0,0 mouse coordinates, but am having a hard time finding anything relevant.
Thanks for any help! :)
Following the discussion in the comments, you'll have to decide which method works best for you. Unfortunately, having never worked with DirectInput, I do not know the ins-and-outs of it.
However, Window Messages work best for RTS-style controls, where a cursor is drawn to screen. This is due to the fact that this respects user settings, such as mouse acceleration and mouse speed, whereas DirectInput only uses the driver settings (so not the control panel settings). The user will expect the mouse to feel the same, especially in windowed mode.
DirectInput works better for FPS-style controls, when there is no cursor drawn, as window messages give you only the cursor coordinates, and not offset values. This means that once you are at the edge of the screen, window messages will no longer allow you to detect the mouse being moved further (actually, I am not 100% sure on this, so if someone could verify, please feel free to comment).
For keyboard, I would definitely suggest window messages, because DirectInput offers no advantages, and WM input is easier to use, and quite powerful (the WM_KEYDOWN messages contains a lot of useful data), and it'll allow you (via TranslateMessage) to get good text input, adjusted to locale, etc.).
Solving your problem with DirectInput:
You could probably use GetCursorPos followed by ScreenToClient to initialise your MousePos structure. I'm guessing you'll need to redo this every time you lose mouse input and reacquire it.
Hybrid solution (for RTS like controls):
It might be possible to use a hybrid solution for the mouse if you desire RTS-like controls. If this is the case, I suggest, though I have not tested this, to use WM for the movement of the mouse, which avoids the need for workaround mentioned above, and only use DirectInput to detect additional mouse buttons.
Now one thing I think you should do in such a hybrid approach is not directly use the button when you detect it via DirectInput, but rather post a custom application message to your own message queue (using PostMessage and WM_APP) with the relevant information. I suggest this because using WM you do not get the real-time state of the mouse & keyboard, but rather the state at the time of the message. Posting a message that the button was pressed allows you to handle the extra buttons in the same state-dependent manner (I don't know how noticeable this 'lag' effect is). It also makes the entire input handling very uniform, as every bit of input with this enters as a window message.
I'm working on an application that provides a snapping feature for its windows; drag one window close enough to the edge of the screen or another window, and it'll snap into place.
Windows 7 offers a built-in snap feature, and for consistency's sake I would like to get the "how close does this window need to be to be snapped" metric from the OS when possible. GetSystemMetrics doesn't seem to have anything particularly useful, however, and the DWM docs are similarly unhelpful.
Is there any way I can programatically get this metric?
Actually there is no such metric because the "snap distance" you are looking for is actually always 0.
When you drag a toplevel window on Windows 7 (and possibily Windows 8, not sure about that), it actually snaps as soon as the mouse pointer hits the edge of the screen.
The "snap system" you want, snaps the dragged window in place as soon as one of it's edges comes closer than x to the edge of another window or to the edge of the screen, where x is the distance you are looking for (typically 10 pixels or so).
My objective is to have a CToolBar derivative which has a single control on it (a CMFCShellTreeCtrl).
Something like:
class CFileTreeBar : public CToolBar
Whenever it is asked to compute its size, I want to respond that it is either a fixed minimum, or the size of the client area of the dock bar to which it is docked. In other words, it should consume the entire height of the dock bar + a fixed width (this is being docked on the left - exactly as Explorer lays out its folder tree on the left).
Hence, in CFileTreeBar::CalcFixedLayout it responds with height based on GetParent()->GetWindowRect(rect), and a width of 250pix.
Then in OnSize, the CFileTreeBar resizes its CMFCShellTreeCtrl to consume our client rect (maximizes our only control).
This works beautifully for when the control bar is initially displayed. And it works great when resizing the window by dragging a corner. The CaclFixedLayout returns a different value from its previous value (because the window size changed) and so it computes that it should consume the entire vertical space and eventually I get an WM_SIZE message telling my control bar to resize, which causes me to update the size of the CMFCShellTreeCtrl.
Where I am struggling is when hitting "maximize" button on the CFrameWnd. In this case, for reasons I don't really understand, the CalcFixedLayout is called but the dock bar has its old size (it hasn't been updated to the new sized based on being maximized yet). This causes my code to respond that the size should be the same as it was previously - which causes MFC frame work to not issue a resize (we're already the size we claim we need to be).
Hence, a moment later the dock bar is expanded to consume the whole vertical space, but my control bar and its underlying shell tree are not resized - but left behind with the stale size.
The problem happens also when going from maximized to restored. At that point the call to CalcFixedLayout indicates that we should be as tall as the maximized window (its current size), and now the frame work kicks off the resizing code which ends up making us larger than the dock bar (once it is resized down to restored size), and we disappear below the bottom of the dock bar (clipped by it's maximum vertical extent).
Questions
Is there a good tutorial or white paper showing the overview of how dockbars and control bars are supposed to interact in MFC? i.e. a complete description of how this frame work is supposed to hang together properly? Understanding how these pieces fit together and are intended to work coherently would go a long way towards avoiding hacking it to work, allowing me to write something round to fit the round hole, so to speak.
Is there an example project similar to this that anyone is aware of? Having to figure this junk out is incredibly time consuming - if there is an example somewhere which does this, then that would be great...
Dockable and resizable toolbar is quite complicated to code, there is one in codeproject which is quite good. You can study the source code to see how the author do it.
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/6/CSizingControlBar-a-resizable-control-bar
On Windows, when you use the mouse to click and drag in a scrollbar to scroll it up and down, you can move the mouse approximately ~120 pixels away from the scrollbar before the dragging stops working. (By contrast, on the mac you appear to be able to move it anywhere on the screen and the drag will still happen.)
Is there a constant I can get at, maybe using SystemParametersInfo or something, to get the OS-defined value for this? I'm using a control that simulates a scrollbar, and I'd like to use the same behavior for how far you can drag away from the bar before scrolling stops.
Thanks!
GetSystemMetrics has a lot of these values. However, there is no Windows API that retrieves this value.
As an aside, you should think carefully before simulating a control. There is a lot more code to implementing the control correctly (including support for accessibility, keyboarding and other behaviours) that will tend to make your scroll bar either lacking in features or more costly than you intend.
I'm currently writing a c++ console application that grabs the mouse position at regular intervals and sends it to another visual application where it is used to drive some 3d graphics in real time. The visual app is closed source and cannot be altered outside it's limited plug-in functionality.
Currently I'm using the GetCursorPos() function which is easy and fast enough, but I'm running into the issue that all of the data is clipped based on the current screen resolution of 1920x1600 so that all x values are between 0 and 1920 and all y values are between 0 and 1600 no matter how far the mouse is physically moved.
I need to get the mouse position before it's clipped at the edge of the screen, or possibly the deltas which I could use to calculate the current position.
I've seen some references to the windows MouseMove event but I would really not want to implement a window to make it work or especially have it as the active to receive those events.
I'm working in a windows environment and a language change is not feasible.
I might be wrong, but in Win32 land you don't get mouse move messages when the mouse is at the edge of the screen because, well, the mouse isn't moving. The usual way to get an infinite mouse area is to do the following:
Hide the mouse, get exclusive access and record position
Centre mouse to window
When mouse moves, get delta from centre of screen to current position
Centre mouse to window again
The next mouse move should have a delta of (0,0), so ignore it
Go to 3 until end of mouse move operation
Reset position, show the mouse and release exclusive access
If you didn't hide the mouse, then you'd see the mouse moving a small distance and then snapping back to the centre position, which looks nasty.
This method does require a message pump for the mouse move messages so the console application idea probably won't work with this. Can you create a full screen invisible window for grabbing the mouse?
Just get the position, and move it to the center and return the delta yourself
This is how FPS games do it
I don't have any direct experience with raw input, which is probably what you need to tap into. According to MSDN, you have to register the device, then setup your winproc to accept the WM_INPUT messages and then do your calculations based on the raw data.
Here's another relevant link.