VC++, making buttons and textboxes an object - c++

At the moment I’m working on a win32 application in Windows. I made a dialog in Visual Studio 2005, I added some check boxes and buttons. In C# + .net the boxes and buttons are an object. That way you can look if they are on or off, change their names and more.
I want the same thing in VC++, but I don't get it to work. At the moment I save the status in the DLGPROC, I look when a button is pressed and I update a variable. But that is not a good way. Can someone tell me how I can do this?
Is there a way to make all the buttons and check boxes an "object"? Or can I use a function to change the name of a static text field and get the status of a field?
Thanks.

Use MFC or WTL or (moving away from Windows-specific stuff) wxWidgets or QT or GTK.
Obviously you could write the code yourself rather than using a library, but providing object wrappers round all of the Windows control functionality is a lot of work.

I am not sure if this is what you are after, but you can think of a HWND as of an "object", all your controls have HWND handle, you can send message to EditBox and get its contents using WM_GETTEXT message, you can also send message WM_SETTEXT to static control to set its text.

Related

Trying to write a c++ console program to change a setting controlled by a windows checkbox

Is it possible to create a keyboard shortcut to switch between the monitor and portion selection of this wacom preferences window, via a c++ console program?
Sorry if this is poorly worded, I've had trouble trying to find the right words to search for ways to do it.
I think it should be possible, although a bit tedious. You should be able to use the Windows API, and try to EnumWindows/EnumDesktopWindows to identify the respective application Window, and its respective controls (which are also Windows).
You should identify the window title, and class ids, for the app window, and the checkbox button controls, then when you enumerate through all the desktop windows, you can identify the ones you are interested in.
Then you can use the SendMessage() API to send messages to the controls (Windows) of interest to manipulate them.
It's a bit tedious, but sounds possible.
An example of use here to get an idea:
http://www.cplusplus.com/forum/windows/25280/

Using ListControl in a Dialog window

Can ListControl be used in a dialog in a Non-MFC project? I am using visual c++ 2010.
The examples I have seen so far uses MFC, so it seems to me that ListControl is part of MFC. The code I am working on is not MFC based, however, Visual Studio still allows adding a ListControl to the dialog in the resource view, and generates rc code for the List Control. So my guess is that I should be able to use it. However, I could not use the standard method found online to add variable to the ListControl and use it.
How can I use the ListControl in this case? e.g. adding a column or write something to a cell? Some code example will certainly help.
The CListCtrl class is an MFC class. It can only be used from within an MFC project.
However, CListCtrl is simply a wrapper around the ListView common control, and a ListView control can be used in any Windows application—no MFC required.
The Resource Editor included with Visual C++ (confusingly) refers to a ListView control as a "List Control". You can insert one on your dialog, and all it will do is insert a ListView control.
If you're using MFC, you can choose to create a member variable corresponding to that control. The type of that member variable will be CListCtrl, because it is encapsulating access to a ListView control on your dialog.
If you are not using MFC, you can still use the ListView control, you'll just have to use the standard SDK mechanisms for accessing and manipulating it. For example, to insert an item into the ListView control on your dialog, you would obtain the control's window handle (GetDlgCtrlID) and send it a LVM_INSERTITEM message. The SDK documentation contains sample code listings, but they are a rather poor way to learn. The best resource for good old Windows SDK programming is still Charles Petzold's Programming Windows.

How can I change the language in AfxMessageBox?

I have an MFC app that uses AfxMessageBox to display message boxes. The app itself lets an end-user to change the user interface language. On the inside it does so by loading resources using LCIDs (or FindResourceEx API.) My issue is that I can't seem to make AfxMessageBox to take LCID to change the language for OK, Cancel buttons, etc. This also affects File and Folder Open dialog windows.
Any ideas how to do this?
PS. This approach must work under Windows XP and up.
According to this SO article, there are no standard functions for this, there's a link to a CodeProject article "Localizing System MessageBox" with source code for a DLL (it's in c# but seems simple enough to be rewritten in C++) which uses Windows Hook so that you can supply your own text for the MessageBox buttons; there's even a suggestion for sizing buttons to the text in the discussion part of the same article.

C++ -- Win32 API, GUI stuff

I've been messing with Win32 API for abit, and I've got a question regarding the GUI functions.
How does one handle user input that is not managed through popup windows? I've been reading http://www.winprog.org/ but right when the interesting features comes -- lesson9 -- it becomes more abstract and I'm not sure how to do it.
Basically what I am after is the user to write input in two windows and then press a button to send a message that the content of the input is to be processed.
I think the input windows would be some EDIT-class windows and the input BUTTON-class but that's about it.
Any ideas? I'm sure it's simple, it's just makes me want to rip my hair of in native code :p
Cheers
You're correct, you want and EDIT control which is more commonly known as a TextBox and a BUTTON class which is a command button.
To get the the input the Button will send a WM_COMMAND message to its parent window with a BN_CLICKED in the wParam high word. You can identify the particular button from the hWnd you get in that message.
After that you'll need to post a WM_GETTEXT to the edit control to retrieve the users input.
This is all from memory so I highly recommend looking up the msdn pages before you code.
I'm not sure I follow 100%. Yes, you would use EDIT and BUTTON-class controls for that. Where are you getting stuck?

DLL plugin that creates a parented window doesn't handle messages correctly

I'm creating a plugin framework, where my application loads a series of plugin DLL's, then creates a new window and pass this new window's handle to the plugin. The plugin can, then, use this handle to create their own GUI.
Everything seems to be working very well. The only problem is that when I press TAB on a plugin widget (An editbox, for example), it doen't jump to another widget. I figured out that some Windows messages are passed, and some others aren't. The WM_KEYDOWN is passed for other keys, because I can type on the editbox, but this message doesn't handle TAB key.
Hope somebody has a hint.
I'm using Borland VCL with CBuilder, but I think I could use any framework under WIN32 to create these plugins, since they never know how their parent windows were created.
It's very complex matter indeed.
When you hit TAB focus jumps to another control only when these controls belong to a Modal Dialog Box. In fact there are some buttons like ESC, LEFT, RIGHT, DOWN, UP, TAB which modal dialog message function treats in a special way. If you want these keys to behave in similar way with modeless dialog box or any other window you should change you message processing function and use IsDialogMessage inside. You'll find more information about IsDialogMessage function in MSDN also to better understand this stuff you may check as well Dialog Boxes section.
And, as was mentioned before, you should set WS_TABSTOP and WS_GROUP styles when needed.
Good luck!
I believe you'll have to take the following steps:
Subclass your edit controls (and other controls as needed).
Capture the WM_KEYDOWN message in your edit control's WndProc.
Check to see if the shift key is currently held down (using GetKeyState or similar).
Call GetWindow, passing in a handle to your edit control and either GW_HWNDPREV or GW_HWNDNEXT depending on whether shift is held down. This will give you the handle to the window that should receive focus.
Call SetFocus and pass in the window handle you got in step 4.
Make sure you handle the case where your edit controls are multiline, as you might want to have a real tab character appear instead of moving to the next control.
Hope that helps!
I believe you suffer from having a different instance of the VCL in each of your dlls and exes. Classes from the dll are not the same as the ones from your exe, even if they are called the same. Also global variables (Application, Screen) are not shared between them. Neither is the memory since they both have their own memory manager.
The solution is to have the dlls and the exe share the VCL library and the memory manager. I am not a BCB developer, but a Delphi developer. In Delphi we would just use the rtl and the vcl as runtime packages. Maybe you could do the BCB equivalent.
A DLL has its own TApplication object.
to provide uniform key handling. when the DLL Loads.
assign the DLL::TApplication to the EXE::TApplication
Be sure to do the reverse on exit.
--
Michael