Microsoft Agent; Providing a Custom Popup Menu

This article was previously published in my blog, Just Like a Magic.

A second honeymoon with Microsoft Agent. Do you remember our article Programming Microsoft Agent in WinForms and our sample application PartIt? After you have included your desired agent in your application, are you feeling bad with the default popup menu? If so, then you are in the right place (welcome :).)

Enough talking, let's get to work! First, prepare your code that loads the Microsoft Agent and brings it to the screen.

After that, create your System.Windows.Forms.ContextMenuStrip and add your required items (well, including "Hide" maybe) and finish the item event handlers.

Now, let's complete it. Get to the code that loads the agent character (e.g. calls the Characters.Load() method of the agent control object, AxAgentObjects.AxAgent) and just disable the AutoPopupMenu flag/property of the character object, AgentObjects.IAgentCtlCharacterEx. This flag/property determines whether to allow the default popup menu or not.

For example, the following code disables this property:

AxAgentObjects.AxAgent agentCtl;
AgentObjects.IAgentCtlCharacterEx agentChar;
// initializing 'agentCtl'
// . . .
agentCtl.Characters.Load("Merlin", "merlin.acs");
agentChar = agentCtl.Characters.Character("Merlin");
agentChar.AutoPopupMenu = false;

Next comes the interesting point. When the character is clicked, the ClickEvent event of the agent control (AxAgent) fires. So the next step is to handle this event and to provide your code that brings up your custom context menu. Consider the following code:

// agentCtl.ClickEvent += agent_ClickEvent;
public void agentCtl_ClickEvent(object sender, AxAgentObjects._AgentEvents_ClickEvent e)
{
if (e.characterID == "Merlin") // check for this if you have many characters
{
if (e.button == 2) // 1 = left, 2 = right
{
myContextMenu.Show(e.x, e.y);
}
}
}

Well done!

Have a nice Sunday!