Display ToolTip in any place on the screen

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Introduction

This article shows how to display tooltips at any location on the screen.

To create a tooltip it is necessary to create a window of class TOOLTIPS_CLASS, then to fill a TOOLINFO structure:

typedef struct tagTOOLINFO{
	UINT      cbSize; 
	UINT      uFlags; 
	HWND      hwnd; 
	UINT_PTR  uId; 
	RECT      rect; 
	HINSTANCE hinst; 
	LPTSTR    lpszText; 
    #if (_WIN32_IE >= 0x0300)
	LPARAM lParam;
    #endif
} TOOLINFO, NEAR *PTOOLINFO, FAR *LPTOOLINFO;

We determine two parameters in this structure which are interesting to us:

uFlags

uFlags it is chosen equal TTF_TRACK, that gives us an opportunity of use message sending to choosing a position for ToolTip and control visibility.

lpszText - the task of the text which we want display.

Now we send the message in system, about desire to create the emerging help where we transfer the reference to our structure TOOLINFO

SendMessage (hwndTT, TTM_ADDTOOL, 0, (LPARAM) (LPTOOLINFO) *ti);

Then we send a TTM_TRACKPOSITION message  which sets the coordinates of ToolTip

SendMessage (hwndTT, TTM_TRACKPOSITION, 0, (LPARAM) (DWORD) MAKELONG (m_x, m_y));

And finally we send the message to activate the ToolTip

SendMessage (hwndTT, TTM_TRACKACTIVATE, true, (LPARAM) (LPTOOLINFO) *ti);

History

1 Sep 2002 - updated source code