InformIT: Visual C++ 6 Unleashed

Table of Contents

Summary

It is a rare Visual C++ application programmer who never needs to use dialog boxes. Understanding the intricacies and MFC behavior will help you customize and use the dialog box mechanism.

In this chapter, you learned how to create dialog box templates via the Resource Editor. You also saw how (if necessary) you can create and use memory-based dialog box templates.

You saw how font size affects the dialog box control sizes and position, and how to con vert between dialog box coordinates and screen coordinates.

You examined how to use the CDialog class to display ordinary modal dialog boxes and how CDialog exchanges data through the data-exchange mechanism. It is important to understand the sequence of events when initializing a dialog box, updating the individual controls during its lifetime, and then performing validation and data transfer from the controls after the user clicks OK to close it.

You can map simple, value-holding variables to these controls for simple transfer, or you can map control-mapping objects to enjoy all of the sophistication of the Windows controls and their messages via an MFC C++ class specific to the type of control.

You can extend these standard controls with your own derived controls to specialize the functionality offered by the standard controls. Then you can use ClassWizard to add your newly derived control classes to the dialog box.

You saw how the subclassing mechanism attaches your derived class's message map to a control so that it can catch and handle specific messages sent to and from the control.

Modeless dialog boxes let you leave the dialog box open for use while the user works with other parts of your application. This is a handy technique for providing extra floating controls or feedback panels.

Finally, you learned how to use dialog bars, which present an interface similar to a toolbar but offer controls from a dialog box template. These dialog bars allow easier design and positioning of the controls than is possible with an ordinary toolbar.

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