Ivor Horton's Beginning Visual C++ 2012

CREATING A DIALOG RESOURCE

Here’s a concrete example. You could add a dialog to Sketcher to provide a choice of pen widths for drawing elements. This ultimately involves storing and modifying the current pen width in the document, as well as adding capability in the element classes to allow variable pen widths. You’ll deal with all that, though, after you’ve gotten the dialog together.

Display the Resource View, expand the resource tree for Sketcher, and right-click the Dialog folder; then click Insert Dialog from the pop-up to add a new dialog resource to Sketcher. This results in the Dialog Resource editor swinging into action and displaying the dialog in the Editor pane, and the Toolbox showing a list of controls that you can add; if the Toolbox is not displayed, click Toolbox in the right-hand sidebar or press Ctrl+Alt+X.

The dialog has OK and Cancel button controls already in place. Adding more controls to the dialog is simplicity itself: you can just drag the control from the list in the Toolbox window to the position at which you want to place it in the dialog. Alternatively, you can click a control from the list to select it, and then click in the dialog where you want the control to be positioned. When it appears you’ll still be able to move it around to set its exact position, and you’ll also be able to resize it by dragging handles on the boundaries.

The dialog has a default ID assigned, IDD_DIALOG1, but it would be better to have an ID that’s a bit more meaningful. ...