Simple version
Is there any way to maintain focus on menu after clicking a menu command?
Detailed version
Specifically, I've made a menu with some menu item with checked property. The problem is that each time I click checked menu item the menu lose its focus. It can be pretty annoying when there is a number of menu item with checked property and I want to manipulate them at once.
The most elegant solution for the problem would be maintaining focus on menu, but I can't find a way to apply it. Is it possible? And if so, what's the way to do that?
Even if there would a solution for it, sooner or later you will enter a situation in which a numerical or string property is changed via the menu, and then it becomes even impossible to keep the focus on the menu (while the dialog requesting the number or string is on the screen).
The first, simple alternative would be to put the checkable menu items on a toolbar or ribbon (just like Word does with Bold, Italic, Underline, ...). Numerical/string properties can then also be added on the toolbar or ribbon.
A second alternative could be to have a more complete configuration dialog in which the user can change all the configuration items. The configuration dialog can co-exist with the current checkable items, so users simply changing one check and users changing many properties all get a quick way of doing what they want.
You might also pose this question on https://ux.stackexchange.com/ (this sibling site is more oriented towards good user interface practices).
Related
I have a window which shows a table on the left half. On the right half I display properties of the item which is selected in the table. The user can now change these properties.
The properties are represented by different kinds of controls: textFields, sliders, numberSteppers and popUpButtons.
The user can - besides using the mouse - use the tab key to navigate through the UI Elements. When the table has the focus tab will select the first editable item on the right side, then tab walks through the items and after the last item will go to the table again.
When the table has focus and I change the value of a popUpButton or move a sliderthe default behaviour of the API (Apple's Cocoa) is to change the value but keep the focus on the table.
My intuition would tell me that after changing a control element it should have the focus (i.e. become firstResponder). But I checked some of macOS' preference panes and they behave similarly.
In Apple's Human Interface Guidelines I do not find mention of that specific topic.
So my question is:
Is there a guideline or at least best practice an app should follow regarding if a control element like a popUpButton or slidershould get the focus when clicked or edited?
Is there some sort of shortcut key that I am missing here for swapping panels around in the form editor of vs2010?
I have numerous panels which are swapped at runtime according to an enum "toggle" value and the only way I seem to be able to move them back and forth is to make one panel smaller than another and right click it. Half the time I end up selecting some other object in the action of trying to right my panels.
I figured there must be something i'm missing here.
there are icons on the layout toolbar for this task. I pick the panel in properties and move it around with those. Way easier than right clicking and hoping for the best.
edit: although sometimes the buttons are not enabled when you need them to be. Still right clicking a resize handle adorner dot will pop up the context menu where you can then choose to move back/forward.
I still wish there was some key combo I could press. Hitting the 4px of display area that the adorner dot occupies on my screen is sort of a dexterity test of sorts and slows me down.
I've got some code that grabs the TaskBar buttons and their text from the windows TaskBar using User32.SendMessage with the TB_GETBUTTON message to retrieve a TBBUTTON structure (Win32 API via C# P/Invokes). But I'm trying to figure out how to then, once I have the handle to the button, grab the associated context menu text. There is some status information on there for a specific application that I would like to retrieve. The button text gets me some of it, but I need to the context menu text to complete it.
Any ideas?
This is not completely clear... Context menus don't have text, as such - they have menu items, each one of which will have text. By "context menu text", do you mean the text of the menu items in the taskbar button's popup/context menu? For example, "Restore", "Minimize" etc in the screenshot below?
If so, I suspect you're going about this the wrong way:
This menu doesn't belong to the button, but is the system menu of the window represented by the taskbar button. If the button has a context menu, this is probably for a grouped collection of windows, not one specific window (or even windows for one process.)
Making judgements based on the context menu of a window sounds like a dodgy approach to me, especially based on text since that will change depending on where in the world your user is located. Applications can also change the contents of this menu so there's no guarantee it will contain something you expect to be there. It would be better to check the window style, if it's minimized, etc, to find out the information that also affects the contents of the menu.
I'm going to answer this based on what your needs seem to be from the question, not what you've directly asked, since (a) it's not possible as asked and (b) I think you're trying to do something else. (As a general guideline, in a question it's good to state why you're trying to do something - and even maybe ask about that, ie 'how do I achieve X' - in case there's a better method than the one you're using. Here, X is probably 'find out information about this window' not 'get the text of the context menu', because that's probably only one possible method to get to X.) Also I think extracting data from the internals of a third-party application like Explorer (the taskbar is an Explorer window) is fragile and prone to break in future versions of Windows.
The system menu or window information (whichever one) belongs to application windows. Unless taskbar buttons are grouped (and then it's the subitems) one taskbar button corresponds to one specific window in the system. So what you want to do is find these windows. You do this by:
Using the EnumWindows function
Then for each window that is passed to the callback, checking the extended window style using GetWindowLong with GWL_EXSTYLE to see if the WS_EX_APPWINDOW bit is set
In addition, sometimes other windows are shown: these heuristics should help.
Each one of these windows is a window that should appear on the taskbar, Alt-Tab dialog, etc.
You say you're getting the text of the taskbar button - this is probably the window caption of the window, and GetWindowText is the canonical (read: probably a lot more reliable) way to get the caption of a window belonging to another process.
If you really want the popup menu, then:
Use GetSystemMenu to retrieve the handle for the system menu for the window. Applications can customise this, so if your app is doing this (and that's why you want the popup menu) ensure you pass false to the bRevert parameter
You can then get the number of menu items using GetMenuItemCount and for each one call GetMenuItemInfo to get info about each menu item. Pass true to the fByPosition parameter to indicate you're accessing the menus by position (since you know the count, you're getting item 0, 1, 2... count-1).
This fills a MENUITEMINFO structure, which (I think, I haven't ever had to code this so I haven't tested) will tell you the text associated with an item via the dwTypeData field "if the MIIM_STRING flag is set in the fMask member".
If you really want information about the window status, you can get this information using methods like IsIconic to see if it's minimized, GetWindowLong again to get other information, etc. I'd suggest you ask another SO question about how to get whatever specific information about a window for details.
Hope that helps!
I have CMenu instance on which I add multiple items. For one of the items I added in it, I set the MF_HILITE flag.
When I show the menu, the appropriate item get hi-lighted correctly, as requested. The problem is that it stays hi-lighted until I move the mouse over it and leave. I only want one item to be hi-lighted at the time. It seems that Windows does not un-light it when another item is hi-lighed.
How could I force it to be un-lighted as soon as another item get the hi-light? I could not find any mouse-over callback or message for the menu, and I could not find a invalidate either.
You're using MF_HILITE in a weird way. The item isn't actually highlighted, it's just drawn like it is. If the user presss enter, the "highlighted" item won't be selected.
You're probably looking for MF_DEFAULT.
It does not appear to be possible.
The internal state for the currently selected item in the menu can't be set. Using the MF_HILITE or HiliteMenuItem does not set the currently selected item, it only sets the visual style.
As a work-around, I have used a popup ListBox instead, which has all the features I need.
In trying to learn the very fundamentals of menu handling. My test app's menubar has 3 menus -- namely "TestApp", "File" and "Help". I find I can remove these menus entirely, simply by calling say:
NSMenu* rootMenu = [NSApp mainMenu];
[rootMenu removeItemAtIndex:2];
However, I'd only ever want to temporarily disable them (gray them out). Is there an equally simple way to do this, please?
I may be misunderstanding your question, but it seems like you want to be able to gray-out the actual titles of menus that appear with the system's menu bar (Such as graying-out the "File" menu). I'm not sure if it's even possible, but it certainly goes against the Apple Human Interface Guidelines:
A menu’s title is displayed undimmed
even if all of the menu’s commands are
unavailable (dimmed) at the same time.
Users should always be able to view a
menu’s contents, whether or not they
are currently available.
So, the real solution to the problem is to be able to gray-out all of the menu items within a certain menu when your application is in a certain state. To do this, implement the NSUserInterfaceValidations protocol. It only requires implementing the - (BOOL)validateUserInterfaceItem: method. Typically, when implementing this method, you simply check the selector of the user interface item being validated, and return YES if it should be enabled, or NO if it should not (which will gray-out the menu item).