Hyperlinks within AfxMessageBox - mfc

Is it possible to add hyperlinks to websites/email to messages that appear in windows created by AfxMessageBox? If not, what is a simple way to replace a AfxMessageBox call with one that spawns a similar-looking window with text that contain hyperlinks?
Thanks.

You can't use the standard MessageBox for this (whether wrapped by AfxMessageBox or not) but there are a couple of other options for you:
If you're using Vista, you can use
the TaskDialog class instead.
If not, you can adapt one of the
MessageBox replacement classes (such
as XMessageBox) to support this
functionality.

Related

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.

How to customize open/save file dialogs?

I have seen some programs use custom open/save file dialogs in that manner they add some extra buttons there.
How can I do this?
Note that I want to use the basic open/save dialogs, so I dont have to re-create them, thus remain the buttons in the OS language. I only want to add some extra buttons there.
Update: As David Heffernan points out below, this answer applies to Windows platforms before Vista. From Vista onwards, you should use the
IFileDialogCustomize COM interface instead.
Basically, you have to set the OFN_ENABLETEMPLATE flag in the OPENFILENAME structure you're passing to GetOpenFileName()/GetSaveFileName(). This allows you to specify a custom dialog template in the lpTemplateName member of the same structure. This template will be used to build the dialog box. See Explorer-Style Custom Templates for all the details.
Note that if you add your own controls to the dialog box (buttons in your case), you should
also set the OFN_ENABLEHOOK flag and specify a callback function in the lpfnHook member of the OPENFILENAME structure, so you can handle the messages sent by these controls. See Explorer-Style Hook Procedures for more information.
This should help you
Customizing common dialog controls

Is there Path Edit Control in Win32?

I would like to add an edit box (or is it a combo box?) for entering a file-path using Visual C Win32 so that it offers auto-complete - the same as when you type in Windows Explorer's address bar.
Is there a common control or property I'm missing that allows me to do that?
You can use the standard edit control and call SHAutoComplete. Like this:
SHAutoComplete(editWnd, SHACF_DEFAULT);
The system will do the rest for you.
There is no Common Control for that. What you can do, however, is use a standard Edit control and attach the IAutoComplete interface to it, which can be configured to use the file system (amongst other things) as a source for getting string values from. The easiest way to do that is to call the SHAutoComplete function.

What are the possible classes for the OpenThemeData function?

I'm trying to call the OpenThemeData (see msdn OpenThemeData) function but I couldn't determine what are the acceptable Class names to be passed in by the pszClassList parameter.
HTHEME OpenThemeData(
HWND hwnd,
LPCWSTR pszClassList
);
Could anybody tell me what are the acceptable class names that I can pass into that parameter?
Thanks!
The article Parts and States on MSDN contains a table which shows the control classes, parts, and states. The values in the table are defined in Vsstyle.h and Vssym32.h.
Here is a quick reference:
BUTTON, CLOCK, COMBOBOX, COMMUNICATIONS, CONTROLPANEL, DATEPICKER, DRAGDROP,
EDIT, EXPLORERBAR, FLYOUT, GLOBALS, HEADER, LISTBOX, LISTVIEW, MENU, MENUBAND,
NAVIGATION, PAGE, PROGRESS, REBAR, SCROLLBAR, SEARCHEDITBOX, SPIN, STARTPANEL,
STATUS, TAB, TASKBAND, TASKBAR, TASKDIALOG, TEXTSTYLE, TOOLBAR, TOOLTIP,
TRACKBAR, TRAYNOTIFY, TREEVIEW, WINDOW
The answer to the question Windows Visual Themes: Gallery of Parts and States? provides a "Parts and States Explorer" application where you can browse and test most of the styles.
I know this is an old question, but I want to give an updated answer (2018) for those who come here from Google.
The accepted answer of DavidK says to look into the file "AeroStyle.xml" where the themes are defined. This file was part of the Windows 7 SDK, but has been removed from the Windows 10 SDK, so the accepted answer is not useful anymore.
The answer of splash links to the MSDN where the list of theme names, parts and states is highly incompetlete and not updated.
The themes are drawn by UxTheme.dll which reads the images and colors, etc. from the file aero.msstyles in the folder C:\Windows\Resources\Themes\Aero on Windows 10.
To see the classes inside the XYZ.msstyles file use msstyles.Editor:
https://github.com/nptr/msstyleEditor
Several themes can only be obtained if you pass the correct window handle. There seems to be an automatic mechanism which detects the type of control from a window handle. If you pass the handle of the wrong window you may get another theme handle than expected or even NULL.
Microsoft internally has changed all their code to use OpenThemeDataForDpi() instead of OpenThemeData() because each monitor on Windows 10 may have a different resolution.
The problem that we have here is a severe lack of documentation in the MSDN and a lack of an API function to enumerate all availabe themes. Shame on Microsoft (once more).
You can look in "AeroStyle.xml" as a previous poster noted, which gives an exact list for Vista/Aero. However, if you want to play safe (and you probably do) the class names should, in general, be Windows class names of Windows common controls. For example, push buttons and check boxes use the class name "Button", the edit control "Edit", etc. I generally pick the class name of the control that's closest to whatever custom element I'm working on is, and use the theme data for that. That way you'll get code that works with XP, Vista and (hopefully) Windows 7, regardless of what the user's selected theme actually is.
However, unless you use raw Win32 a lot, you probably don't do much control creation directly using the class name. The class names are rather liberally sprinkled throughout MSDN. A good place to start is usually the "CommCtrl.h" file from the Platform SDK, which has a lot of them, and they're always described in the MSDN help on the individual common controls. You can also often learn them by looking at how dialogs are defined in .rc files by opening them in a text editor: these contain the class name for the controls.
Class names depend on the theme. For example, as the documentation for OpenThemeData states:
Class names for the Aero theme are
defined in AeroStyle.xml, which is
found in the Include folder of the
Microsoft Windows Software Development
Kit (SDK).
It has nothing to do with Aero, which even doesn't exits on XP !
See the source code of OpenThemeData()..

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