Preventing inadvertant drag and drop

Have you ever had the experience that you clicked on the Explorer to bring

it to the foreground and the directory got moved. This happens if the mouse

moves before the mouse button is released. Many of the users of my program

had this experience and heres what I did to prevent inadvertant drag

–

drop. I basically imposed the restriction that after pressing the mouse

button the cursor should remain on the item for a few milliseconds before

dragging can be initiated.

Step 1: Declare member variable

Add a member variable to hold the tick count when the user presses the

mouse button.

protected:
        DWORD   m_dwDragStart;

Step 2: Define a constant to specify the delay

We define DRAG_DELAY with a value 80. You might want to use a different

value.

#define DRAG_DELAY 80

Step 3: Add handler for WM_LBUTTONDOWN

The only interesting thing we do here is initialize the m_dwDragStart variable.

GetTickCount() returns the number of milliseconds since Windows was started.

void CTreeCtrlX::OnLButtonDown(UINT nFlags, CPoint point) 
{
        m_dwDragStart = GetTickCount();
        CTreeCtrl::OnLButtonDown(nFlags, point);
}

Step 4: Check for sufficient delay in TVN_BEGINDRAG handler

Insert the following code right at the beginning of the TVN_BEGINDRAG handler.

In a previous section we have used the name OnBeginDrag() for the handler

function. If the delay since the user pressed the left mouse button is

not sufficient, we not initiate the drag and drop process.

        // This code is to prevent accidental drags.
        if( (GetTickCount() - m_dwDragStart) < DRAG_DELAY )
                return;