Ivor Horton's Beginning Visual C++ 2012

ELEMENTS OF A MENU

You’ll look at two aspects of dealing with menus with the MFC: the creation and modification of the menu as it appears in your application, and the processing necessary when a menu item is selected — the definition of a message handler for it. Let’s look first at how you create new menu items.

Creating and Editing Menu Resources

Menus and other user interface elements are defined separately from the program code in a resource file, and the specification of an interface element is referred to as a resource. You can include many kinds of resources in your application: typical examples are menus, icons, dialogs, toolbars, and toolbar buttons. You’ll be seeing more on these as you extend Sketcher.

Having a menu defined by a resource allows you to change the physical appearance of the menu without affecting the code that processes menu messages. For example, you could change your menu items from English to French, or Norwegian or whatever, without having to modify or recompile the program code. The code to handle a message doesn’t need to be concerned with how the menu looks, only with the fact that it was selected. Of course, if you do add items to a menu, you must add code to handle messages for each of them to ensure that they actually do something!

Sketcher already has a menu, which means that it already has a resource file and menu resources. You can access the resource file contents for Sketcher by selecting the Resource View pane, or, if you have the Solution ...