Modeless dialog keyboard handling (winapi) - winapi

Question

I've got an application with a main window which has a bunch of controls, including the spacebar, which is handled by a simple method called onSpacebar(). On top of that main window, I've got a persistent modeless dialog.
I need the spacebar to behave the exact same way, regardless of whether the dialog has focus, or the main window has focus.
This dialog is backed by a DialogProc which looks something like this:
BOOL CALLBACK DialogProc(HWND hDlg, UINT uMsg, WPARAM wParam, LPARAM lParam)
{
switch(uMsg)
{
case WM_NOTIFY:
std::cout<< "WM_NOTIFY" <<std::endl;
switch(LOWORD(wParam))
{
// which component caused the message?
case COMP_TREE:
if(((LPNMHDR)lParam)->code == NM_DBLCLK){
onDoubleclk()
}
//...
break;
// other components...
}
break;
case WM_CLOSE:
// the dialog can only be closed when the whole app is closed
//EndDialog(hDlg, IDCANCEL);
return TRUE;
case WM_DESTROY:
PostQuitMessage(0);
return TRUE;
}
return FALSE;
}
From what I gather, I should call my onSpacebar() method from within the DialogProc, similarily how I handle the double click. I can see that WM_NOTIFY is received by the dialog when the spacebar is pressed (the phrase WM_NOTIFY is printed to cout), but I can't seem to differentiate the spacebar notification from the other numerous notifications the dialog receives.
Please, tell me how to recognize that the particular WM_NOTIFY was in response to a spacebar keypress.

Answer 1

A WM_NOTIFY message is not the standard way that a window processes key press events. When a key is pressed, your window should be receiving WM_KEYDOWN, WM_KEYUP, and possibly WM_CHAR messages. WM_NOTIFY serves an entirely different purpose altogether: passing on a message from a common control to its parent window.
So the fact that you're receiving a WM_NOTIFY message in response to a key press is a fairly unusual thing, explainable when you understand how focus works (which is key to solving your ultimate question).
In Windows, only one window can be focused at a time, and the currently focused window is the one that receives all keyboard input. Thus, if a dialog box has the focus, it will receive key press notifications. If a child control on that dialog box has the focus, it (not its parent dialog) will receive key press notifications. And there is a focusable child control on a dialog box, it will always receive the focus in preference to its parent dialog, therefore it will also always receive key press notifications.
So the likely explanation for your curious WM_NOTIFY messages is that one of the common controls on your dialog has the focus, it is receiving the space key press event, and after processing it, passing on a notification to its parent window (your dialog) in the form of a WM_NOTIFY message. As you might imagine, this is not a reliable method of detecting that the space bar has been pressed.
Instead, you need to figure out some way of trapping key press notifications before they get sent to the focused control. To do that, you'll need to modify your application's message loop to trap WM_KEYDOWN or WM_KEYUP messages before calling either DispatchMessage or IsDialogMessage.
If the key event corresponds to the space bar, you will call your onSpacebar function and indicate that the message was handled, preventing it from being passed on and processed by another window.
If the key event does not correspond to the space bar, then you will need to handle the message as you usually would, ensuring that it does get passed on and processed by the other window.
Since this approach filters out space key presses at a global level, it solves both the problems of child controls on a dialog stealing the key press and the other modeless dialog. However, you do need to be careful because it's very easy to screw things up so that the user can't navigate your dialog using the keyboard at all.
More fundamentally, I think your idea to handle presses of the space bar is fundamentally flawed. The logic of certain common controls basically requires that they process presses of the space bar. For example, consider a textbox: if you filter out all presses of the space bar at a global level, the user will never be able to type a space in a textbox. If you insist on handling the space bar, you will need to check the focused control in your global handler, and if it's a textbox (or other common control that you wish to receive spaces), pass it on; otherwise, handle it yourself.
Honestly, what I'd do instead is choose a more unique key combination (like, I don't know, Ctrl+Space) and set that up as an accelerator. Presumably, your global message loop is already processing accelerator keys by calling the TranslateAccelerator function, so that would take care of all the dirty work for you. No code is even required—you'd do everything simply by editing the accelerators resource file in your project. The MSDN documentation on keyboard accelerators is here, but you'll probably have an easier time consulting your favorite book on Visual C++.