iczelion tut9

Tutorial 9: Child Window Controls

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In this tutorial, we will explore child window controls which are very important input and output devices of our programs.

Download the example here.

Theory:

Windows provides several predefined window classes which we can readily use in our own programs. Most of the time we use them as components of a dialog box so they're usually called child window controls. The child window controls process their own mouse and keyboard messages and notify the parent window when their states have changed. They relieve the burden from programmers enormously so you should use them as much as possible. In this tutorial, I put them on a normal window just to demonstrate how you can create and use them but in reality you should put them in a dialog box.
Examples of predefined window classes are button, listbox, checkbox, radio button,edit etc.
In order to use a child window control, you must create it with CreateWindow or CreateWindowEx. Note that you don't have to register the window class since it's registered for you by Windows. The class name parameter MUST be the predefined class name. Say, if you want to create a button, you must specify "button" as the class name in CreateWindowEx. The other parameters you must fill in are the parent window handle and the control ID. The control ID must be unique among the controls. The control ID is the ID of that control. You use it to differentiate between the controls.
After the control was created, it will send messages notifying the parent window when its state has changed. Normally, you create the child windows during WM_CREATE message of the parent window. The child window sends WM_COMMAND messages to the parent window with its control ID in the low word of wParam,  the notification code in the high word of wParam, and its window handle in lParam. Each child window control has different notification codes, refer to your Win32 API reference for more information.
The parent window can send commands to the child windows too, by calling SendMessage function. SendMessage function sends the specified message with accompanying values in wParam and lParam to the window specified by the window handle. It's an extremely useful function since it can send messages to any window provided you know its window handle.
So, after creating the child windows, the parent window must process WM_COMMAND messages to be able to receive notification codes from the child windows.

Example:

We will create a window which contains an edit control and a pushbutton. When you click the button, a message box will appear showing the text you typed in the edit box. There is also a menu with 4 menu items:

1. Say Hello  -- Put a text string into the