Windows standard controls (Note 1)

A widget is a window with standardized behaviors. It is generally used for dialog boxes or other windows to act as elements that interact with users. In Visual C ++, you can use three types of controls:

(1) Windows standard controls

Windows standard controls are provided by the Windows operating system and some new controls are provided in Windows 95. All these control objects are programmable. You can add them to the dialog box using the dialog editor provided by Visual C ++. The Microsoft basic class library (MFC) provides classes that encapsulate these controls, which are listed in table 6.1.

Table 6.1 windows standard controls

Widget	MFC class	Description
Animation	Canimatectrl	Display consecutive AVI Video Clips
Button	Cbutton	Buttons used to generate certain behaviors, as well as check boxes, radio buttons, and group boxes
Combo box	Ccombobox	Combination of edit box and list box
Edit box	Cedit	Used to type text
Title Header	Cheaderctrl	A button located above a line of text to control the width of the display file
Hotkey	Chotkeyctrl	Used to quickly execute some common operations by pressing a combination of keys
Image list	Cimagelist	A collection of images (typically a set of icons or bitmaps. The image list itself is not a control. It often works with other controls to provide the list of images used by other controls.
List	Clistctrl	Window for displaying the text and its icon list
List box	Clistbox	Including a list of strings
Progress	Cprogressctrl	Used to prompt the progress of user completion in a long operation
Multi-format text editing	Cricheditctrl	Provides a window for text editing with character and paragraph formats.
Scroll bar	Cscrollbar	Provides widgets for the dialog box.
Slider	Csliderctrl	Contains a window with an optional Slider
Rotate button	Cspinbuttonctrl	Provides an arrow that can be used to increase or decrease a value.
Static text	Cstatic	It is often used to provide labels for other controls.
Status Bar	Cstatusbarctrl	Window used to display status information, similar to the cstatusbar of the MFC class

Continued table 6.1

Widget	MFC class	Description
Tab	Ctabctrl	In the tab dialog box or on the properties page, provide a tab with a look similar to the labels used in the notebook.
Tool bar	Ctoolbarctrl	A window with a series of command generation buttons, similar to the ctoolbar of the MFC class
Tooltip	Ctooltipctrl	A small pop-up window that provides a simple description of toolbar buttons or other controls.
Tree	Ctreectrl	Used to display the inheritance structure of a series of items

As mentioned above, in MFC, The cwnd class is the base class of all window classes. Naturally, it is also the base class of all control classes. Windows standard controls are provided in the following environments:

• Windows 95
• Windows NT 3.51 and later versions
• Win32s 1.3
• Note:
• Visual c ++ 4.2 and later versions do not support win32s.

　

(2) ActiveX Controls

ActiveX controls can be used in a dialog box or HTML document. This type of control is called an ole control in the past. This book describes ActiveX controls in special chapters. It is pointed out that ActiveX controls use completely different interfaces and implementation methods from standard controls.

(3) Other MFC controls

In addition to Windows standard controls and ActiveX controls compiled by yourself or from third-party software developers, MFC also provides three other controls, which are encapsulated by the following three categories:

• Cbitmapbutton is used to create a button that uses bitmap as a tag. A Bitmap Button can contain up to four bitmap images, which represent the four different states of the buttons.
• The cchecklistbox class is used to create a selection list box. This type of list box contains a check box before each item to determine whether the item is selected.
• The cdraglistbox class is used to create a special list box, which allows users to move list items.

In this chapter, we only describe the first type of controls, namely Windows standard controls. The content involved includes the use of various controls and related skills.