Advanced MFC Programming

Chapter 7. Common Dialog Boxes
Old Style
If we are writing code for Win32 applications, the above-mentioned method does not work. We must
use the old style file dialog box to implement folder selection.
The default dialog box has two list boxes, one is used for displaying directory names, the other for
displaying file names. One way to implement directory selection dialog box is to replace the standard
dialog template with our own. To avoid any inconsistency, we must include all the controls contained in the
standard template in the custom dialog template (with the same resource IDs), hide the controls that we
don’t want, and override the default class to change its behavior.
To use a user-designed dialog template, we must: 1) Prepare a custom dialog template that has all the
standard controls. 2) Set OFN_ENABLETEMPLATE bit for member Flags of structure OPENFILENAME, assign
custom dialog template name to member lpTemplateName (If the dialog has an integer ID, we need to use
MAKEINTRESOURCE macro to convert it to a string ID). 3) Assign the instance handle of the application to
member hInstance, which can be obtained by calling function AfxGetInstanceHandle().
The standard file dialog box has two list boxes that are used to display files and directories, two combo
boxes to display drives and file types, an edit box to display file name, a “Read only” check box, several
static controls to display text, and “OK”, “Cancel” and “Help” buttons. The following table lists their IDs
and functions:
Function ID symbol ID Value
Static control used to display directory stc1 1088
Static control contains string “List Files of Type” stc2 1089
Static control contains string “Folder” stc3 1090
Static control contains string “Drive” stc4 1091
Edit box used to input file name edt1 1152
List box used to display files lst1 1120
List box used to display directories lst2 1121
Combo box used to display file types cmb1 1136
Combo box used to display drives cmb2 1137
Static control contains string “Directories” not defined 65535
“Read only” check box chx1 1040
OK button
IDOK
Cancel button
IDCANCEL
Help button pshHelp 1038
Figure 7-2 shows the positions of these controls.
stc3
edt1
lst1
stc1
lst2
IDOK
IDCANCEL
stc2
stc4
pshHelp
cmb1
cmb2
chx1
Figure 7-2. Standard file dialog template
We must design a dialog template that contains exactly the same controls in order to replace the default
template with it. This means that the custom dialog template must have static controls with IDs of 1088,
1089, 1090..., list boxes with IDs of 1120 and 1121, combo boxes with IDs of 1136 and 1137, and so on.
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