Adding a Recent File List to an MFC dialog based application

Introduction

I am often writing simple utility applications for helping make life easier while programming. When I first started programming DOS applications I often wrote simple command line utilities to do some mundane tasks. When moving to the Windows world I continued to write the simple utilities as command line programs until I started using MFC. MFC dialog based applications gave me what I thought was the DOS command line utility of the Windows world.

The one thing missing from MFC dialog based applications that I enjoyed using in many Windows applications was the use of the recent file list.

It is actually not to difficult to add the recent file list capabilities to the MFC dialog based application. The first thing to do is add your menu to the dialog. Make sure you give it the IDR_MAINFRAME id. This is one of those special ids that MFC uses internally to do certain actions such as the recent file list. After you add your menu add an entry to that menu which contains the id ID_FILE_MRU_FILE1. After you have added the menu you will need to modify your applications CWinApp::InitInstance call. You will need to add two calls:

SetRegistryKey(_T("CodeProject Recent File List Dialog Demo"));
LoadStdProfileSettings(); // Load standard INI file options (including MRU)

The SetRegistryKey will setup a location in the Windows registry database to store your applications recent file list entry. The LoadStdProfileSettings will load the standard INI file options which includes your applications most recent file list. You will also need to override the CWinApp::OpenDocumentFile function. This function is called when you select a file from your recent file list. You will notice in the sample application that the function returns 1 instead of a CDocument*. This can be done because the calling function CWinApp::OnOpenRecentFile does not use the return value. The last thing that needs to be done is to cause the menu to display your recent file list in the menu. This is done by overriding the WM_INITMENUPOPUP in your dialog box class. Inside the OnInitMenuPopup function you will force the calling of the OnUpdate handlers for the menus. In particular we need to call the OnUpdate handler CWinApp::OnUpdateRecentFileMenu for the recent file list menu item. When setting up the CCmdUI for calling the OnUpdateRecentFileMenu we need to be sure to set the m_nIndexMax value otherwise you will assert when there are no no recent files in the registry.