how to remove drop down arrow from combo box? - winapi

I am working on a sample application to display combo box. i could display the combo box.
But i want to remove the combo box drop down arrow.
please let me know how to do this.

You can't do this without painting the control yourself. But there's no point to do that because a combo box that can't be dropped down is an edit box. Use one of those instead, perhaps supporting auto suggest.

even with all of the common control library's support for owner/custom drawing, getting rid of the combo box is difficult to impossible. most likely impossible.
i would not have even tried if there weren't significant complexities involved to switching to a different type of control...
just my experience, and in a past life i did owner-drawn toolbars and such all day long.

Related

How to implement a threaded view?

I need to implement a threaded view of sorts in an old VB6 app. It should look similar to this:
So, it's like a TreeView of sorts but there are buttons on the right (for each row) that could be pressed. The view does not need to collapse - it always stays in the expanded mode. The users should be able to respond to each node (via the comment button on the far right). And, of course, users should be able to scroll through the entries.
What are some of the ways I could implement this? I am open to 3rd party controls, paid or not.
VSFlexGrid has an outline mode. You can set the indent per row via the RowOutlineLevel property. It supports word wrap, images, etc within its cells/columns so you should be able to get pretty close to what you want. It also supports owner-drawn which lets you fully customize the cell painting (for example, to get those rounded corners).
I'm sure there are other controls out there as well...

ToolTip while Drop Down ComboBox

I have created a combo box in my project which takes a certain amount of numbers from a file.
This Combo drops down the list of the numbers each of represents something.
That something I want to be displayed in a tooltip when the mouse hovers on the combo box.
Until now everything has gone fine.
What I want now is to see the tooltip when the mouse rolls over the list of the dop down combo.
How can I do that? Until now the internet didn't give me something to work on it.
Is there some one to assist me on that?
Is this the sort of thing you're looking for, where a tooltip appears over a ComboBox item you mouse over?
If so take a look at this article on codeproject.com:
A Windows.Forms.ComboBox with Item ToolTips for 32 bit Windows XP (SP2)
It's VB.NET and currently displays a ComboBox item's text when moused over; I'm sure you can adapt it to your specific needs.
Finally I solved the issue with Combo Box which I mentioned on this question.
Of course there is no any solution give it from Microsoft for it, but with a small trick we manage to do what we want to do from one hand, and nobody seams to understand HOW we did it from the other hand.
So if anybody wants to see this solution please set a question and I will try to answer immediately.
For "bad and worst" please put a comment on this question.
My code is in vb.net.

Combobox dropping up?

Is there a way to make combobox be dropping up instead of down?
I have answered that Q but it's in Delphi (the code is not so hard to understand though):
Can I programmatically set the position of ComboBox dropdown list?
You need to subclass the ComboBox hwndList (You obtain that handle via GetComboBoxInfo API) using SetWindowLong (GWL_WNDPROC) and handle WM_MOVE message to place that hwndList in a new position.
Not with the standard Windows combo boxes (Here are the available styles for combo boxes).
As #ILMV said, Windows will drop the box up instead of down if there is not enough space below the box.
You can test this with notepad - go to format -> font, and drag the box down so that the Script combo box is just above the start menu. Click the combo box - it drops up.
If you want it to always drop up, you'll have to make your own.

Visual C# Express 2008 Form Designer AutoScroll

This may not be the kind of question one should ask on StackOverflow, but here's a frustration that I've been trying to find a work-around for.
When using the form designer, suppose the entire form does not fit in the space allotted to the form designer, and I have a control say, down near the bottom of the form.
If I try to re-size that control, or move it using the mouse, the work area will auto-scroll to the top of the work area. This essentially pulls my control to the top of the screen. It isn't possible to scroll with the scroll wheel while "holding" a control, and even ScrollLock does nothing for me.
Is there any way to just turn the auto-scrolling off? That way I can at least work on my form without guessing numbers to type into the properties window.
Can't you just turn off autoscroll for the form?
I think it's off by default.
Form.AutoScroll = False

Looking for alternatives or improvements to drop down lists/menus on websites

Drop-down lists, menus and combo boxes are all very common user interface elements. Users are accustomed to seeing these elements in native applications and sometimes web apps, but there are a few problems with them.
You have to aim the mouse. Some menus collapse when you mouse out, and some have submenus that you have to aim at to expand.
You can't see the options without aiming the mouse first.
These are the main things that trouble me, maybe other people notice other issues as well. I normally don't use drop-down menus at all if I can help it.
The problem is that I sometimes want to present a long list of options in limited space. Issue 2 is a sacrifice I'm willing to make, but I'm wanting to know if anyone has any tricks to make these drop menus easier to use. Maybe someone has invented a new style of list control.
I'm sure that if these types of controls annoy me, then they annoy users of my site more.
Hmm..one more thing which annoys me about the dropdown list is the inability to control their width as it expands with the text (or is their something which I am unaware of ?).
For an alternate, I think about a little popup which initially displays a list of available options in form of Alphabetic index and when the user clicks on an alphabet link, it displays the relevant options to select from. This will reduce the options to select from.
On the same terms, we can use ajax to build the options on the fly as user types in.
You could try something like Mac OS/X has for its taskbar, similar to the selection bar in YouTube. I think the common term is a bubble bar where small images animate larger as the mouse rolls over them, but shrink back down to such a size that all items are visible when the mouse is not over the control.
#Nrj
width='20px' will keep the collapsed drop down at a width of 20px. Problem is, Inernet Explorer shows the expanded item with this width also, while all other browsers i met so far will show you the full menu.

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