A Static Hyperlink control

• Download demo project - 15Kb
• Download source - 4Kb

Introduction

This article describes a simple CStatic derived Hyperlink control, which can be used in your project to link to any URL such as your company's website or EMail. In addition to that, this control can fire an event  to the parent dialog, it can be used to popup another dialog, or whatever else you want to do.

This controls features include :-

1. Link to the URL  and EMails ,and can be link in to another child dialog
2. Customize the colors of link, visited and hover (if you do not specify, they use the standard style)
3. Enable/disable the Tooltip, and customize the back-color and text-color of the tool-tip

Using the code

For using this class in your project, you have to do :-

1. Add MyHyperlink.cpp and MyHyperlink.h to the project.
2. Include MyHyperlink.h in the header file where the controls are defined
3. Create (or edit) a member variable for each button you want to customize as CMyHyperlink. If the Class Wizard doesn't show the CMyHyperlink type, select CStatic and then edit the code manually.

In the demo project, m_Static1, m_Static2, m_Static3 are the CMyHyperlink controls :-

//Set the target URL 
m_Static1.SetLinkUrl("www.codeproject.com");
//Enable showing the Tooltip
m_Static1.ActiveToolTip(1);
//Set the Tooltiptext
m_Static1.SetTootTipText("Click Here to go Codeproject");
//Set the tooltip Background Color
m_Static1.SetToolTipBgColor(RGB(0, 0, 0));
//Set the Tooltip Text Color
m_Static1.SetToolTipTextColor(RGB(0, 255, 0));

// Change the default Linktext, HoverText, Visited Colors 
// if you don't specify the colors the control will use the 
//defaults..

m_Static1.SetLinkColor(RGB(255, 0, 0)); 
m_Static1.SetHoverColor(RGB(0, 0, 255));
m_Static1.SetVisitedColor(RGB(0, 13, 0));

m_Static2.SetLinkUrl("mailto:renjith_sree@hotmail.com");
m_Static2.ActiveToolTip(1);
m_Static2.SetTootTipText("Click here to Email Me..");

//The SetFireChild(1) method will enable the 
//event firing to the parent dialog
m_Static3.SetFireChild(1);
m_Static3.ActiveToolTip(1);
m_Static3.SetTootTipText("Click Here to Fire An event to parent");

For trapping the event from the CMyHyperlink control you must trap the message in your dialog by adding the ON_MESSAGE(_HYPERLINK_EVENT,OnChildFire) in the MESSAGE MAP of the dialog, the definition of the function is like

void CControlContainerDlg::OnChildFire(WPARAM wparam, LPARAM lparam)           
{
    //...
}

The WPARAM contains the ID of the control from where the Event coming from.

Points of Interest

During the development, I faced a problem to get the standard windows  hand cursor when the mouse is over the controls. I searched for that  in various resources and at last I found that from a site, they described how to load the hand cursor resource from a file, but here I also included a resource of hand cursor with id IDC_CURSOR_HAND