Advanced MFC Programming

Chapter 1. Tool Bar and Dialog Bar
Before modifying source code to add the second tool bar, we need to prepare the tool bar resource. In
order to do this, we need the following steps to create a tool bar resource that contains four bitmap buttons:
1) Load the application project into Developer Studio.
1) Execute Insert | Resource… command from the menu (or press CTRL+R keys). We will be prompted
to select resource type from a dialog box. If we highlight “toolbar” node and click the button labeled
“New”, a new blank tool bar resource “IDR_TOOLBAR1” will be added to the project. Since default ID
doesn’t provide us much implication, usually we need to modify it so that it can be easily understood.
In the samples, the newly added tool bar resource ID is changed to IDR_COLOR_BUTTON. This can be
implemented by right clicking on “IDR_TOOLBAR1” node in WorkSpace window, and selecting
“Properties” item from the popped up menu. Now a property sheet whose caption is “Toolbar
properties” will pop up, which contains an edit box that allows us to modify the resource ID of the tool
bar.
1) Using the edit tools supplied by the Developer Studio, add four buttons to the tool bar, paint bitmaps
with red, green, blue and yellow colors, change their IDs to ID_BUTTON_RED, ID_BUTTON_GREEN,
ID_BUTTON_BLUE, ID_BUTTON_YELLOW. The tool bar bitmap window could be activated by double
clicking on the tool bar IDs contained in the WorkSpace window, the graphic tools and color can be
picked from “Graphics” and “Colors” windows. If they are not available, we can enable them by
customizing the Developer Studio environment by executing Tools | Customize… command from the
menu.
Declaring New Member Variable
After the resource is ready, we can add code to implement the tool bar.
The first step is to declare a new variable using CToolBar in class CMainFrame:
……
……
class CMainFrame : public CFrameWnd
{
protected:
CStatusBar m_wndStatusBar;
CToolBar m_wndToolBar;
CToolBar m_wndColorButton;
};
The new variable is m_wndColorButton, it is added right after other two variables that are used to
implement the default tool bar and status bar.
Next, we can open file “MainFrm.cpp” and go to function CMainFrame::OnCreateClient(…). In
Developer Studio, the easiest way to locate a member function is to right click on the function name in
“WorkSpace” window, then select “Go to Definition” menu item from the popped up menu. Let’s see how
the default tool bar is created:
……
……
if (!m_wndToolBar.Create(this) ||
!m_wndToolBar.LoadToolBar(IDR_MAINFRAME))
{
TRACE0("Failed to create toolbar\n");
return -1;
}
Function CToolBar::Create(…) is called first to create the tool bar window. Then
CToolBar::LoadToolBar(…) is called to load the bitmaps (contained in tool bar resource IDR_MAINFRAME).
When calling function CToolBar::Create(…), we need to specify the parent window of the tool bar by
providing a CWnd type pointer (Generally, a tool bar must be owned by another window). Because this
function is called within the member function of class CMainFrame, we can use “this” as the pointer of
parent window.
The following code fragment shows how the styles of the default tool bar are set:
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