I'm wondering how to create windows like these alt text http://img824.imageshack.us/img824/997/this.jpg
I'm refering to the one that says Marquee selection tool... these ones. I'm also not referring to the skin. I know how to do my own drawing and what not, this is not the issue. It's because windows usually need a parent which means it should not be possible for these windows to overlap into the tools. The only windows that can do this are context menus and menus. How can I create this style of window? Thanks
I think you are confusing the concept of owner windows and parent windows. Only dialog controls have parent windows, and these are automatically clipped by the parent's client area. Other windows have owner windows. This is a weaker relationship. There's nothing stopping a window from overlapping its owner.
Also, I wouldn't assume that just because the toolbar launches the context menu that the toolbar window has a relationship with the menu window. It might or might not, depending on how things are coded behind the scenes.
In any case, just try it out. Use the TrackPopupMenu() to create a popup. You can have it overlap the owner window without difficulty. Any window without the WS_CHILD style will exhibit the same behaviour.
Related
Is in Qt something like GTK.headerbar or any other possibility to add wiget (button for example) in window title?
Thanks in advance.
Short answer is 'no', Qt doesn't implement any kind of window decorations (except QWS which is a different story).
In Linux the title bars (window decorations) are carried by Window Managers, like Metacity or Compiz. Windows and OSX use their own window decorations. Qt has almost no control over what happens on the window title bars.
Gnome3/GTK3 (and not Gnome2) allows you to use widgets in the title bar but it's not the case for many other Desktop Environments / Window Managers. Your options are:
Use the API provided by the window manager / OS
Pros: native look.
Cons: you need to maintain separate implementation for each OS / DE. Not all support doing such.
Hide window decorations and implement you own
Pros: code once, use everywhere. Google Chrome and Vivaldi do that, for example.
Cons: you need to implement window resize and move
Use an overlay widget on top of the system title bar that will always follow the window
Pros: pretty much straightforward to do but I don't recommend it.
Cons: the widget will always lag when moving the main window. Native look still has to be implemented. Take into account that user can switch the theme and the widget will look odd.
i am trying to implement a custom tab control in my win32 window, for that i have used a layered window which is child of the main app window (for the main tab control) and independent windows for individual tab items.
My problem: Whenever i move the main app window, the control window moves along with it (because its the child window) where as the individual tab item windows remain on their position. Can anyone guide me how to to get the tab items windows move along with the main app window concurrently? I can not set the item windows as child of the app, so please base your suggestions on that.
You should redesign your tab to be a child window. Otherwise your attempts to make it work is nothing but a desperate try to fix the thing made bad in first place.
Still if you feel like sticking the original plan, you need to hook/subclass the main app window and handle its movement and sizing messages (WM_MOVING and friends) so that your handler could update your popup/tab window position respectively.
I am designing a UI engine that needs to render into popup (WS_POPUP) windows. As these windows cannot be children of other windows, each instance is given its own taskbar icon.
I need a way to prevent the taskbar icons from appearing for certain windows that are created as "dialogs". I cannot use an OS-provided dialog because they all have frames (and I can't figure out how to render into them) or a tool-created custom dialog (which seem to require the CLR).
I am not an expert with the windows API and I feel that I have missed something obvious...
Also: Anything involving CLI/CLR is not an option.
EDIT:
The WS_EX_NOACTIVATE style can be used for this purpose as well, though the activation behavior would need to be emulated by the program.
If you set the WS_EX_TOOLWINDOW extended style for your window, it won't be shown in the task bar or Alt+Tab list. This does cause the window to be rendered slightly differently, however (thinking floating tool palette).
Does anyone know if it is possible to use drag and drop with a tray icon using Qt?
I've been doing some research and here is what I have come up with:
A QSystemTrayIcon cannot explicitly handle a drag/drop event. However there is a workaround based on the Spifftastic tray icon location method.
You create a uniquely colored icon
and place it as the icon for a brief
moment and take a screenshot of it.
Given that you know the color
sequence for the icon, you can
search through the screenshot and
locate the particular icon's
location.
A transparent widget is positioned
over the icon and is used as the
drop target.
I have yet to work at a few of the finer details of the operation but that is the gist of it. All things considered it is a hacky way of things but given that there are no other ways to do this I think it is acceptable.
Fluffy App (written in C#) uses the Spifftastic method to locate the tray icon. I'm assuming the part about the transparent window is how they accomplish that but I have yet to decompile and examine their system.
Since QSystemTrayIcon is a QObject, not a QWidget, my guess is this is not possible. The system tray icon isn't really owned by Qt - it's passed on to the 'desktop', i.e whatever part of the Gnome/KDE/Windows/Mac is drawing the relevant area. At least on Mac, you'd be dropping on the menu-bar, which would be a very strange UI. For Gnome and KDE it's a FreeDesktop.org standard, but again I don't think its your process which actually does the drawing, and hence there's no way for Qt to get events such as drag and drop to you.
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.