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FriendFeedHybrid Edit Control that Combines Prompt Text and Edit Control
Posted
by Tom Archer - MSFT
on May 17th, 2000
This article was contributed by Tom Archer.
Introduction
If you've ever used Intuit's Quicken or Peachtree's Accounting for Windows, you may have noticed something called a "grey edit control" on some of the dialogs and views. As you can see in the figure above, a grey edit control is one in which the text is grey and italicized until the control has focus or until data has been entered into the control. Where this little control becomes useful is in situations where there is simply no room on the dialog (or view) for a static control telling the user what information is required. An example might be the address portion of a form where the controls are "nestled" so closely together that any attempt at placing static controls near the edit controls would look awful. Another great example of where this control is useful is when you want your dialog (or view) to (as closely as possible) represent an actual paper document such as an invoice or purchase order.Rules for Display
- If the field has a value, then display that value
- If field has focus and no value, then display a blank
- If field does not have focus and has no value, show prompt (in italics) so that user knows what is needed.
Using the CGreyEdit Control
To use theCGreyEdit control, all you need to do is instantiate it and call its
Init method function.
BOOL CGreyEdit::Init(UINT uiControlId,
CWnd *pParent,
const char*lpszDefaultText,
COLORREF lBackgroundColor,
UINT uiAlignment)
where
- uiControlId - Resource ID of the edit control you want to subclass
- pParent - Parent window of the control
- lpszDefaultText - Default, or prompt text, to be displayed until control has focus or user has entered data into the control
- lBackgroundColor - This value defaults to COLOR_WINDOWTEXT and represents the controls background color
- uiAlignment - Valid values include TA_CENTER, TA_LEFT or TA_RIGHT. Defaults to TA_LEFT
To use the control, smply create a member variable of type CGreyEdit
in your dialog or view class. Then call the object's Init function. Here's an
example of doing this:
BOOL CGreyEditTestDlg::OnInitDialog()
{
//...
m_editName.Init(IDC_EDT_NAME,
this,
_T("Last Name, First Name"),
RGB(255,0,0));
//...
}
Downloads
Download demo project - 15 KbDownload source - 3 Kb
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