Creating Embedded Child Property Sheets

Environment: Windows NT4 SP6, Visual C++ 6 SP3

Having a property sheet inside a property page causes some problems:

  • Child CPropertySheet hangs if focus is switched (Q149501).
  • Parent property sheet terminates even if a child page has a Data Exchange failure.
  • OK, Cancel, and QuerySibling messages are not transferred to child sheets.
  • Child sheet has to be created and sized manually.
  • The class CChildPropertyPage derived from CPropertyPage
    solves the above problems. To use a child property sheet you simply use
    this class instead of CPropertyPage to implement your resource.
    You add the child pages in the same way as you would add pages to a normal
    property sheet. See the demo project.

    The example project implements the above example. It shows how to use the
    child property sheet on a full page and limited by a group box. The example
    is simply created with the following statements:


    CPropertySheet dlg(“Test”);

    CChildPropertyPage Page1(IDD_PROPPAGE1);
    CChildPropertyPage Page2(IDD_PROPPAGE1,0,0,IDC_GROUP);
    CPropertyPage Page11(IDD_PROPPAGE2);
    CPropertyPage Page12(IDD_PROPPAGE2);
    CPropertyPage Page21(IDD_PROPPAGE3);
    CPropertyPage Page22(IDD_PROPPAGE3);

    dlg.AddPage(&Page1);
    dlg.AddPage(&Page2);
    Page1.AddPage(&Page11);
    Page1.AddPage(&Page12);
    Page2.AddPage(&Page21);
    Page2.AddPage(&Page22);

    The CChildPropertyPage constructor takes four arguments:

  • ID of the template used for the page.
  • ID of the name to be placed in the tab for the page. If 0, the name will be taken from the dialog template for this page. Default is 0.
  • The index of the page that will initially be on top. Default is the first page added to the sheet, page 0
  • ID of control in which the child property sheet has to fit. If 0, then the child property sheet fills the entire page. Default is 0.
  • Downloads

    Download demo project – 6 Kb

    Download source – 2 Kb

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