Display colored text on Status Bar

The Code Machine

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23 May 20021 min read

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An article with code on displaying colored text on panes in a Status Bar using MFC

Download demo project - 29 Kb

Introduction

I wondered how to change text color of panes on the status bar same as what Visual SourceSafe file difference window does. In this article, I will show how to make status bar panes display their text in different colors. A regular status bar can have many panes. It could be desirable in some cases that each pane's text could be displayed in a different color.

If you open the demo project file in Visual C++, you will see two new files, namely ColoredStatusBarCtrl.cpp and ColoredStatusBarCtrl.h. CColoredStatusBarCtrl wraps the owner-drawn capability of CStatusBar MFC class.

Besides above stuff, you could see some changes in MainFrm.cpp and MainFrm.h.

In MainFrm.h, the following line is inserted before the class definition

#include "ColoredStatusBarCtrl.h"

Now look for following line

CStatusBar m_wndStatusBar;

Its class type is changed to

CColoredStatusBarCtrl m_wndStatusBar;

In MainFrm.cpp, look for following array declaration

static UINT indicators[] =
{
    ID_1,
    ID_2,
    ID_3,
    ID_4,
};

I created empty entries in string table for above ids. They will just stay there doing nothing.

Now in CMainFrame::OnCreate(), I inserted the following code before the return statement:

for (int i=0; i<4; i++)
{
    // Change Status Bar style to make it Owner-drawn
    m_wndStatusBar.GetStatusBarCtrl().SetText("", i, SBT_OWNERDRAW); 

    // Make each pane's of same size
    m_wndStatusBar.SetPaneInfo( i, 
        m_wndStatusBar.GetItemID(i), SBPS_STRETCH, NULL );
}

Limitation

CColoredStatusBarCtrl is not generic. You may need to tweak it to make it workable for you. It just makes the point. I wish I could write a control for it.

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