I'm trying to find a simple way to change the colour of the text and background in listview and treeview controls in WTL or plain Win32 code.
I really don't want to have to implement full owner drawing for these controls, simply change the colours used.
I want to make sure that the images are still drawn with proper transparency.
Any suggestions?
Have a look at the following macros:
ListView_SetBkColor
ListView_SetTextColor
TreeView_SetBkColor
TreeView_SetTextColor
There are also appropriate methods of the CListViewCtrl and CTreeViewCtrl wrapper classes:
GetBkColor
SetBkColor
You may also want to take a look at WTL's CCustomDraw::OnItemPrePaint (that's if you need to control the drawing of individual items)
A good article that describes this process is here
It's been a while since I've use the win32 API directly, but I believe that if you handle the WM_ERASEBACKGROUND message for your control, you can use FillRect() in your handler to paint the background using whatever color you like.
Related
Visual Studio's windows have a close button (as well as other frame controls) that blend into the caption color and appear like so:
I was wondering if there's an accepted way of drawing controls like that. Do controls like these use DrawFrameControl or DrawThemeBackground, or do they use another approach altogether?
Thank you for any information.
There are two approaches for creating custom buttons using Win32 API:
1. Draw the control yourself. This is very complicated and requires a lot of knowledge about Win32 controls. Here are some links to get you started:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/controls/user-controls-intro
https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/646482/Custom-Controls-in-Win-API-Control-Customization
Owner-drawn button, WM_CTLCOLORBTN and WM_DRAWITEM (clearing an HDC)
2. Modify an existing control using SubclassWindow. This is much easier, but in most cases very limited.
For example you can use a static control and handle mouse activity for it. You can also use multiple controls and show and move them as needed.
There is no set way of doing this since it's custom logic. But here are some links:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/controls/window-controls
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/inputdev/mouse-input
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/inputdev/wm-mousemove
I want to add checkboxes to my CListCtrl-derived class, that has LVS_OWNERDRAWFIXED-style for drawing them in any subitems. I can draw them simple inside DrawItem member function, but it look a little bit bad. How can I retreive the images of checkboxes, which are used for this control, if the LVS_EX_CHECKBOXES-style is set? It is important, because in each Windows version those checkboxes have its own unique look.
Is it possible?
You call OpenThemeData() to get the current theme's handle and then GetThemeBitmap() to get the images for the checkboxes.
Also have a look at the other GetThemeXXXX() functions to get the correct background
color, text color, font etc.
I also recommend you to play around with ThemeExplorer, it should give you
a great overview how visual styles work. The best thing is, the tools actually uses
OpenThemeData() & co. to render a preview of the controls, so check out its source code (main.cpp, Line 142+) as well!
If you look at the thumbnail images in Windows Explorer you'll notice that they have a drop shadow, is this effect associated with the ListView control or does Windows Explorer does some extra coding to accomplish this effect?
Edit:
So it turned out that Windows uses another control. So my question now is how can I add a drop shadow to the "normal" ListView.
For a standard list view, you may want to use a technique called custom draw (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ff919569(v=vs.85).aspx).
Basically, you ask your list view not to draw its items, but instead send you some window messages for you to draw them yourself. This is a very flexible but also troublesome technique, because you need to handle many things (like whether an item is selected/disabled, font, color etc.)
The drop shadow you see in Windows Explorer is not publicly available for you to use. So you will have to custom-draw the items (NM_CUSTOMDRAW) by yourself.
Not sure if such effect is available in GDI/GDI+, but Direct2D does have one: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/direct2d/drop-shadow
I want to create a slider which contain a different slider handle and i want to paint it according to slider handle position in the slider.
You could use QProxyStyle to ovrride drawComplexControl method - you will have to draw entire control on your own, as there is no separate flags in QStyle::ControlElement for parts of QSlider.
maybe you should look at this: http://doc.qt.io/qt-4.8/stylesheet-examples.html#customizing-qslider
If I understand you correctly, you want a slider that changes not only its position but also its appearance as you slide, right? For example, a mix of QDial and QSlider, ie. a slider with a turning knob.
If so, you will need to subclass either QSlider or QAbstractSlider (or QDial) and do the painting in your own paintEvent(). Note, however, that you will loose all style-awareness unless you care about that yourself (and that is an interesting topic in itself, see http://doc.qt.io/qt-4.8/style-reference.html for more info).
The Qt demos and examples, or the QSlider/QDial source code itself may serve as examples on how to overload a paintEvent().
I want to list the thumbnails of a set of photos in a listctrl. But the only way to achieve this is to use the setImageList method to bind a image list to the CListCtrl object and insert items like this: InsertItem (int nItem, LPCTSTR lpszitem, int nImage). I also must modify the listctrl's style by ModifyStyle(LVS_TYPEMASK, LVS_ICON) to force it to display the icon of each item.
I don't think this approach a good way to achieve my goal. Can I add items of bitmap or other image objects directly in a CListCtrl?
Thank you very much!
Why do you think it's not a good approach? Your other options are to make it an owner-drawn control and render the images yourself, or use a callback for the images via CListCtrl::SetCallbackMask.
List controls use image lists for a reason; the bitmaps are stored in a way that is most efficient for rendering the list control. You would be pretty hard pressed to do it any better.
Given that you need these sorts of extended features, sounds like you must use owner-draw. A good example is here. It doesn't show how to draw the image, but once you've got the owner-draw procedure set up you should be able to use typical BitBlts to paint the images.