I have inherited a project (originally written for Win95!) which has a number of buttons attached to a parent window derived from CWnd. The buttons themselves are in a user-defined class derived from CWnd, so they are not "real" buttons, but little windows that are defined by gazillions of lines of code, and have a ton of display issues that I've been sweating over for several weeks, with no resolution in sight.
We concluded the other day that CBitmapButton looked like a great alternative. Appears simple, define 4 bitmaps for the different button states. About all I need is BN_CLICKED to fire up a handler, and I'd be golden.
After messing around with this for a while, setting up a button and some bitmaps, I was able to display the CBitmapButton; didn't look great, but I can fix that... the problem NOW is that I attempted to set up a message map to capture the BN_CLICKED message, but since the parent window is derived from CWnd instead of CDialog, I get syntax errors setting up the message map. Read the MSDNs on the subject a few times over, and it appears you can only hook up a CBitmapButton to a CDialog-derived class. This seems pretty weird to me - I just want a button, and it should be able to transmit a simple "I was clicked" to whatever parent it's attached to, but apparently not destined to happen.
So, has anyone successfully attached a CBitmapButton to a CWnd-derived parent; and if so how does one set up a message map that will work with these things? Alternatively, what approach would you use to set up a button class that WOULD work with a CWnd parent, since CBitmapButton and CButton seem to require CDialog's as parents?
No it doesn't require that your parent window should always be CDiaglot, you can even inherit from CWnd and create a CButton/CBitmapButton inside it.
You can override OnCommand message in your CWnd derived class and tap the button click event.