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Text Only Status Bar

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3 Jun 2000 118.8K   3.9K   22   9
An easy to use and implement Text Only Status Bar with Tool tip text extracted from the status bar panes.

Sample Image - TextOnlyStatusBarTest.gif

Introduction

You must have seen a lot of very fancy Status Bars in different samples and commercial applications with progress bars, animation, images, etc. Here, I present a technique for making a Text Only Status bar with many text-only panes and with its own tooltips extracted from the Status Bar panes themselves.

You can easily replace the standard status bar in an existing SDI/MDI app by including:

C++
#include "TextualStatusBar.h"

at the top. For a dialog based app, you can create it in OnCreate().

Although this might not be the best Status Bar around, I've shown you the way to deal with a Status bar and tool tip control as a child window. Furthermore, there are a couple of other (read, better!) ways for adding tool tips to any control. The technique I used in the sample is the same one that I used in an app because it was a requirement. I caught WM_NCHITTEST over the status bar and updated the tool tip text.

textonlystatusbar/textonlystatusbartest_small.gif

This example also teaches how to get to the individual panes of the status bar and perform an operation on them. This example also illustrates the tight connection between MFC CStatusBar and CStatusBarCtrl classes.

Please do not hesitate to mail me any bug, suggestion, clarification, query, etc.

License

This article has no explicit license attached to it, but may contain usage terms in the article text or the download files themselves. If in doubt, please contact the author via the discussion board below.

A list of licenses authors might use can be found here.


Written By
Software Developer (Senior) Comcast Cable
United States United States
This member has not yet provided a Biography. Assume it's interesting and varied, and probably something to do with programming.

Comments and Discussions

 
QuestionThe Point? Pin
Peter Ritchie28-Nov-02 3:54
Peter Ritchie28-Nov-02 3:54 
Silly question: what's the point of simply displaying the same text (ie the text from the pane) in another way. We can already read the pane text--a tool tip should provide some added value.
AnswerRe: The Point? Pin
nilaysoft12-Dec-02 18:20
nilaysoft12-Dec-02 18:20 
GeneralRe: The Point? Pin
TuPacMansur15-Jun-05 16:27
TuPacMansur15-Jun-05 16:27 
GeneralA small fix. Pin
Andrew Stampor7-Nov-01 11:19
Andrew Stampor7-Nov-01 11:19 
GeneralUsing global MFC CToolTipCtrl Pin
6-Nov-01 20:39
suss6-Nov-01 20:39 
Generaltooltips in CCstatusBarCtrl Pin
1-Jun-01 18:41
suss1-Jun-01 18:41 
GeneralRe: tooltips in CCstatusBarCtrl Pin
4-Jun-01 5:28
suss4-Jun-01 5:28 
QuestionStatusBar Questions??? Pin
Prasad8-May-01 19:59
Prasad8-May-01 19:59 
AnswerRe: StatusBar Questions??? Pin
Farhan Noor Qureshi9-May-01 5:26
Farhan Noor Qureshi9-May-01 5:26 

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