Dynamic resizing of ActiveX controls hosted by ATL Composite Control

Introduction

Did you cheer when you found out that ATL 3.0 would
support ActiveX control hosting? I did. This functionality was at the top of my
wish list for ATL. ATL 3.0 has finally arrived. What now? In one news group, I
saw the following question: "How do I resize ActiveX controls hosted by
Composite Control?” The answer to this question is very simple, but the
reasoning behind it is not. Therefore, I decided to write this article to share
my knowledge of the inner workings of ATL’s hosting of ActiveX
controls.

How does ATL implement the
hosting of ActiveX controls?

If you will look in ATL code, you will notice that code
for CComCompositeControl takes less then two hundred lines. How is it possible
to fit all hosting support into two hundred lines of code? Well, the answer is
quite simple–CComCompositeControl does not have support for ActiveX hosting.
The real hero behind the scenes is CAxHostWindow.

CAxHostWindow implements necessary interfaces in order
to support the hosting of common ActiveX controls (including windowless) and
Microsoft Web Browser control. In case you do not need to host a Web Browser
control, you can define _ATL_NO_DOCHOSTUIHANDLER in your project and save about
4K in release dll. CAxHostWindow derives from CWindowImpl, and this means it
needs a window to operate. CAxHostWindow can host only one control at a time,
and as a result, one CAxHostWindow is required for each hosted control. Without
going into all the aspects of implementation (look into atlhost.h for more
details), I would like to concentrate here on the way CAxHostWindow handles
WM_SIZE and WM_PAINT.

When CAxHostWindow receives WM_SIZE, it checks if the
hosted control supports IOleObject and sets its new extent. In addition, if the
hosted control is a windowless control, then SetObjectRects() will be called
with the new control size equal to its window size. An important observation is
that a control hosted by CAxHostWindow always occupies the full size of the
window. When handling WM_PAINT, CAxHostWindow exhibits interesting behavior only
for windowless objects. If it is drawing a windowless control, it creates an off
screen device context, paints it with background color (which is by default
COLOR_BTNFACE, if parent window is a dialog, or otherwise COLOR_WINDOW), and
calls Draw method of IViewObject. After that, CAxHostWindow does BitBlt from off
screen context to window context in order to prevent flickering while the
control draws itself. Some controls employ a similar flicker prevention
technique inside their drawing code, which results in a slower drawing of the
control. Consequently, if you are creating a control that you will only use with
Composite Control, you can omit the flicker prevention code.

You do not need to create CAxHostWindow directly. ATL
implements a helper function AtlAxCreateControl[Ex](), which will create an
instance of CAxHostWindow and will make all necessary initializations for you.
AtlAxCreateControl() has the following four parameters: (1) the name of the
control to be hosted; (2) the window handle to be used by CaxHostWindow; (3)
IStream, which can be used to initialize control if it supports IPersistStream;
and (4) pointer to IUnknown, for IUnknown of created CAxHostWindow.

As you can see below, any application can support the
hosting of ActiveX controls with ease, using support provided by ATL.

#include "stdafx.h"
#include "resource.h"

CComModule _Module;

BEGIN_OBJECT_MAP(ObjectMap)
END_OBJECT_MAP()

int APIENTRY
WinMain(HINSTANCE hInst, HINSTANCE hPrevInst, LPSTR lpCmdLine, int nCmdShow)
{
_Module.Init(ObjectMap, hInst);

//Register window class here

HWND hWnd = CreateWindow( TEXT("ClassName"), TEXT("Title"),
WS_OVERLAPPEDWINDOW, CW_USEDEFAULT, CW_USEDEFAULT,
300, 300, 0L, 0L, hInst, 0L );

USES_CONVERSION;
CComPtr<IUnknown> spUnk;
HRESULT hRet = AtlAxCreateControl(T2COLE("Some.Control.1"), hWnd, NULL, &spUnk);
if(FAILED(hRet))
return -1;

//Show window and go to GetMessage loop

_Module.Terminate();
return msg.wParam;
}

In the example above, the main window is used to host
the control with ProgID "Some.control.1".

Composite Control

Now that we know how hosting works in ATL, we can
speculate on how Composite Control works. One possible scenario could go like
this: When Composite Control is created, it parses its dialog template; for
every ActiveX control description it finds, it creates a child window and then
passes it and the control’s name to AtlAxCreateControl(). However, the
developers of ATL found a simpler and more elegant solution. In order to
understand their solution, we should first look at the helper window class
provided by ATL. ATL implements a function AtlAxWinInit(), which registers
window class "AtlAxWin". When the window of this class is created, the
handler for WM_CREATE uses the window’s caption as the control’s
name and creates the control hosted in this window. It also converts
CreateParams into IStream and passes it to the control. The handler for
WM_DESTROY releases the host control interface to guarantee its destruction.
Now, we can create the control hosted in the window with even less code.


AtlAxWinInit();
CreateWindow( TEXT("AtlAxWin"), TEXT("Some.control.1"),
WS_CHILD | WS_VISIBLE, x, y, cx, cy, hWndParent, NULL, hInst, NULL);

The above code creates a window and the control hosted
in it in one call.

Now, we’re ready to investigate how Composite Control
creates hosted controls. Composite Control indirectly derives from CAxDialgImpl.
When CAxDialogImpl is created, it calls the helper function AtlAxCreateDialog().
This function initializes "AtlAxWin" by calling AtlAxWinInit() and
then makes a call to a function mysteriously named
_DialogSplitHelper::SplitDialogTemplate(). What this particular function does is
essentially parse through the dialog template and finds all CONTROL entries with
class names starting with "{". When Visual Studio saves the dialog
resource containing ActiveX controls, it saves information about each control in
a form that look like a windows control, but instead of a window class, it
writes the CLSID of the ActiveX control.


IDD_DIALOG DIALOGEX 0, 0, 286, 177
STYLE WS_CHILD
EXSTYLE WS_EX_CONTROLPARENT
FONT 8, "MS Sans Serif"
BEGIN
CONTROL "",IDC_CONTROL,"{3343C18D-A997-11D2-B348-00A0244AE119}",
WS_TABSTOP,3,3,133,171
CONTROL "Progress1",IDC_PROGRESS1,"msctls_progress32",WS_BORDER,
87,95,80,14
END

This is the dialog template created by Visual
Studio.

For each ActiveX control found, SplitDialogTemplate()
replaces it with record that looks like the following below:


CONTROL "{3343C18D-A997-11D2-B348-00A0244AE119}",IDC_CONTROL,"AtlAxWin",
WS_BORDER, 3,3,133,171

This is how the control record would look after being
processed by SplitDialogTemplate().

As you can see this record look exactly like the record
of a normal windows control, and it can be created by a standard windows
function like ::CreateDialogIndirectParam() or ::DialogBoxIndirectParam().

Summary

Finally, we get to the bottom of our investigation, and
I can review it in short. Composite Control does not have any hosting
capabilities, and relies completely on support provided by CAxDialogImpl.
CAxDialogImpl uses the ability of "AtlAxWin" to make ActiveX controls
look like windows controls. CAxHostWindow provides support for the hosting of
ActiveX controls, but it requires a window to do so.

Now, we can go back to the question, "How do I
resize ActiveX controls hosted by Composite Control?” We know now that the
answer is simple – "In the same way you would resize any windows control in
dialog, because Composite Control doesn’t know the difference!" Let’s
illustrate it with the following code sample:


LRESULT OnSize(UINT, WPARAM wParam, LPARAM lParam, BOOL& bHandled)
{
int cx = LOWORD(lParam);
int cy = HIWORD(lParam);

HWND h = GetDlgItem(IDC_CONTROL);
::SetWindowPos(h, NULL, 3, 3, cx – 6, cy – 27, SWP_NOZORDER);

h = GetDlgItem(IDC_PROGRESS1);
::SetWindowPos(h, NULL, 3, cy – 21, cx – 6, 18, SWP_NOZORDER);
}

Possible implementation of OnSize( ) in Composite
Control.

The implementation of hosting for ActiveX controls in
ATL is simple and lightweight, but it obviously has limitations. All advantages
of windowless controls are effectively eliminated by one control per window
restriction. Methods OnPosRectChange() and RequestNewObjectLayout() are not
implemented. This means you cannot implement resizing per the control’s
request.

ATL’s "AtlAxWin" shows us a very interesting
possibility. We can create a window class that will wrap around some specific
ActiveX control, include mapping controls methods into messages, and make this
control accessible for non-COM environments! The creation process of a wrapper
window class is even possible to automate. This is a very interesting
opportunity, indeed!

Download the supplementary sample

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