Subclassing a control who's parent has to be the Desktop

ldragos

Helo, I am trying to subclass a control which has to be floating over the form's boundaries. I found that this kind of behaviour can be achieved by setting the control's parent the Desktop. I did that, however, the control even if responds to mouse events, doesn't have focus (ie. for a ListViewControl, I can click, doubleclick an Item and it responds to that, however, the Item is never focused - I mean never has a FocusRectangle; or considering a ComboBox control, I can never type into it's EditArea, even if the mouse Cursor changes whenever moving over it). Also, I noticed that the Control is shown in the taskbar, which I also am not satisfied with, and recieves proper focus only when I click on it's taskbar tab. So, my problem is that I cannot activate the control without clicking on it's tab (I tried using every WinAPI function I could think of such as SetActiveWindow, Set Focus, BringWindowToFront etc - none helped). Thanks for the help!

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ldragos22y ago
Thank you for the ideea, but it doesn't satisfy me... I need it to be a control and only the control to be visible at all times. And maybe it would have been simpler if I needed a TextBox, or a LabelEdit, but I need a ComboBox which would slide from within the form and step out of the form's boundaries. An approach simmilar to your suggestion would make things pretty difficult for me. But thanks again, if you have any more ideas, I welcome you to let me know. ldragos
sjones22y ago
The dessktop can't own a control. You can almost make it look like it does. And it sounds like you got pretty far down that road. The problem is that controls do not have the message pump that regular windows do. And they don't have the built-iin support to be top level windows. It sounds like what you need to do is create a "toolbox" style form to host your control.