System Tray Icons - Minimize Your Application to the SysTray

• Download source files - 3 Kb
• Download demo project - 18 Kb

Introduction

This article illustrates the use of Shell_NotifyIcon to create and manage System Tray icons. The article explains the basics of this operation and assists you in creating your own 'Minimize To Tray' applications. The source code provided with this article is designed to work with dialog-based applications, but it can easily be modified to work with a CFrameWnd or CWnd based application.

Creating and Using Tray Icons

To create a Tray Icon, you need to call the following shell function: -

BOOL Shell_NotifyIcon( DWORD dwMessage, PNOTIFYICONDATA pnid );

The dwMessage parameter specifies the action to be taken - NIM_ADD, NIM_DELETE, NIM_MODIFY adds, deletes and modifies tray icons respectively.

The pnid parameter is used to customize, create, delete and obtain data from the Tray Icon. (See the MSDN Library for more details about this structure.)

Creating The Application

1. Create a new VC++ dialog based project. For this example, I will call this project MyTray which will contain the CMyTrayApp and CMyTrayDlg classes.

2. Download and extract the DialogTray source code to the root of the project folder

3. From the Project->Add To Project menu, select Files and then select TrayDialog.h and TrayDialog.cpp. This will add a new class to your project named CTrayDialog.

4. Replace the CMyTrayDlg base class with CTrayDialog.

class CMyTrayDlg : public CDialog

becomes

#include "TrayDialog.h"

class CMyTrayDlg : public CTrayDialog

5. Replace the other occurrences of CDialog in the MyTrayDlg.cpp file as follows :-

CMyTrayDlg::CMyTrayDlg(CWnd* pParent /*=NULL*/)
  : CDialog(CMyTrayDlg::IDD, pParent)

becomes

CMyTrayDlg::CMyTrayDlg(CWnd* pParent /*=NULL*/)	
    : CTrayDialog(CMyTrayDlg::IDD, pParent)

6. Create a menu resource and name it IDR_MENU1

7. In the InitDialog member function, enter the following:

    TraySetIcon(IDR_MAINFRAME);
    TraySetToolTip("ToolTip for tray icon");
    TraySetMenu(IDR_MENU1);

8. Modify the IDD_MYTRAY _DIALOG resource to have a minimize box.

9. Build and run the application

NB : To add tray menu item handlers use the class wizard.

Displaying the tray icon all the time

Simply add a TrayShow() statement to InitDialog() in CMyTrayDlg.cpp, and call TraySetMinimizeToTray(FALSE) to disable minimizing to the tray.

The events that occur in the tray are captured through the following functions:

    virtual void OnTrayLButtonDown(CPoint pt);
    virtual void OnTrayLButtonDblClk(CPoint pt);

	virtual void OnTrayRButtonDown(CPoint pt);
	virtual void OnTrayRButtonDblClk(CPoint pt);
  
	virtual void OnTrayMouseMove(CPoint pt);

Feel free to add more events or to improve on these ones.