Creating a Simple Property Wizard

Introduction & Disclaimer

Property Sheet Wizards can be a rather daunting task for the beginning programmer. Their simple looking surface appearance hides a number of complexities that make it difficult to understand exactly how they function internally. This article will attempt to make it a little bit easier for beginners to understand the basic functioning of a property sheet wizard. For all those that choose to read this article, I make absolutely no claim of 100% accuracy of the contents of this article and encourage CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM with regards to it's contents. You can learn a lot more from a kind word than you can from a flame :-)

Setting Up The Project

The first step in setting up a property sheet wizard is configuring the project itself. For purposes of this article we will be working in Microsoft Visual Studio 6 to construct our property sheet wizard, however I'm reasonably certain that it is small work to port this code to other compiler environments. First, we need to create the base Dialog. I did this using the MFC AppWizard. These are the steps I used:

• Go to File >> New
• Select MFC AppWizard (EXE)
• Enter SimpleWizard as the project name -- You can use any name but I selected this for simplicity
• Click the OK Button

The above steps inform Visual Studio that we want to create a MFC application with the name SimpleWizard. On the screen we are presented with next, we will configure the project so that it will work in a manner consistent with wizard applications. Now we need to further configure the project.

• Select the Dialog Based radio button.

You should see the representation of our application change to appear as a dialog box on the left hand side of the setup window. This shows us that our application will be configured as a dialog application. You should leave the resource language option on the default unless you have a compelling need to change it, as most applications I've ever encountered use the english language resources.

• Click the NEXT Button

All items in this dialog should be left on their default settings with the exception of Active X Control Support and support for Windows Sockets unless you have specific reasons to need this type of functionality in your wizard applications.

• Click the NEXT Button

Again, I suggest leaving all settings on the default as there is nothing in these settings that is terribly useful to use with the exception of how the MFC Dll will be linked. If you choose Shared Dll you will get a smaller executable, however, there are some cases where we are not certain that the target machine has the MFC DLL installed, so it may be useful to Static Link the application against the MFC and import the functions we need. Please be aware that this will greatly increase the size of your executable so, I strongly recommend against it.

• Click the NEXT Button

The only setting that we can change here is the Class Name but we have no useful reason to do that, so let's just finish this up by clicking the FINISH Button

Inserting the Property Wizard Component

Now we have created a MFC Application based on a Dialog with some default setting which will allow us to implement a Wizard. All in all this is a fairly simple setup, but now we get to get into the fun part. Let's continue.

• Go to Projects >> Add to Project >> Components & Controls
• Select the Directory Visual C++ Components
• Select the Property Sheet Component
• Click the Insert Button

This will bring up the configuration parameters for actually inserting the property sheet into our dialog application. It is important that we do this correctly, otherwise the property sheet will not be accessible to the correct classes and we will have to go back and fix it. Better to do it right the first time. Let's continue.

• Select the Wizard Radio button
• Click the NEXT button

On the next screen, we have the option for adding preview support to the wizard classes which will allow our wizard to display feedback based on the options that a user chooses. If this were a more complex wizard, we might be interested in using this, but for our purposes., we are going to remain simple, so leave this unchecked.

• Click the NEXT button

Now we are asked what class we would like to give access to our wizard pages. We could give access to the dialog class which displays our initial dialog box or we coudl give it to the base application class. If we give access to the dialog box class, we have to wire up some mechanism which triggers the wizard to appear. If we give access to teh base application class we can bypass the dialog completely by changing a little bit of code. In this case, let's give the base application access to it. I'll show some code to actually display the property wizard in a little bit.

• Select the CSimpleWizardApp class from the dropdown box
• Click the NEXT button

On the next screen we can set the number of pages that will exist in our wizard. For purposes of our wizard, we wil use four pages, so go ahead and set that to 4 and click NEXT

On the next screen we are given the option to change the names of the classes that will be inserted into our application. For example if we wanted to have pages for detecting hardware, displaying what we found, changing configuration settings, and finalizing our settings, we coudl change the class names to reflect each respective page of the wizard. For now, we can just leave those on the defaults. So let's just click FINISH.

There we have it, our property wizard is now inserted. One major issue remains. How do we actually get our wizard to show up?

Wizard, Show Thyself...

Now that we have everything setup, we need to make the wizard visible. We do this by making some alterations to the bass dialog class. Here how we do it. Open up the the ClassView and find the class named CSimpleWizardApp. What we are looking for here is the InitInstance method of the class which looks like this:

/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
// CSimpleWizardApp initialization

BOOL CSimpleWizardApp::InitInstance()
{
 AfxEnableControlContainer();

 // Standard initialization
 // If you are not using these features and wish to reduce the size
 //  of your final executable, you should remove from the following
 //  the specific initialization routines you do not need.

#ifdef _AFXDLL
 Enable3dControls();   // Call this when using MFC in a shared DLL
#else
 Enable3dControlsStatic(); // Call this when linking to MFC statically
#endif

 CSimpleWizardDlg dlg;
 m_pMainWnd = &dlg;
 int nResponse = dlg.DoModal();
 if (nResponse == IDOK)
 {
  // TODO: Place code here to handle when the dialog is
  //  dismissed with OK
 }
 else if (nResponse == IDCANCEL)
 {
  // TODO: Place code here to handle when the dialog is
  //  dismissed with Cancel
 }

 // Since the dialog has been closed, return FALSE so that we exit the
 //  application, rather than start the application's message pump.
 return FALSE;
}

<P>In order to make our dialog appear, we need to substitute the 
<CODE>DoModal()

/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
// CSimpleWizardApp initialization

BOOL CSimpleWizardApp::InitInstance()
{
 AfxEnableControlContainer();

 // Standard initialization
 // If you are not using these features and wish to reduce the size
 //  of your final executable, you should remove from the following
 //  the specific initialization routines you do not need.

#ifdef _AFXDLL
 Enable3dControls();   // Call this when using MFC in a shared DLL
#else
 Enable3dControlsStatic(); // Call this when linking to MFC statically
#endif

 CMyPropertySheet propSheet;
 m_pMainWnd = &propSheet;
 propSheet.DoModal();
 
 // Since the dialog has been closed, return FALSE so that we exit the
 //  application, rather than start the application's message pump.
 
 return FALSE;
}

This simply tells the application to call DoModal() on th ewizard class instead of calling it on the base dialog resource. That should be enough to get you started on creating Wizard aplications. Granted this is not a complete solution to creating a a proper Wizard, but there are more than enough resources out there on CodeProject and other sites that can discuss setting up wizard buttons and other intricacies. My aim with this article was to show you how to get the wizard to show up in your applications.

I have additionally removed the OnWizard() function that was inserted with the insertion of the wizard classes, since it becomes virtually useless after this modification. Hope this article helps.