Thread: Posting a message to a child window

Hi,
I am having some problem with posting messages. Here's the deal. I have a tabbed window with two tabs. Each tab contain another child window. Tab 1's child window calls a an object of a class called serial(which is not a window). I want to use PostMessage() from the serial class to send messages to the child window. The thing is I don't know how to pass the handle of the child window to the serial class. What function would you use in the child window to get it's handle. Thanks a lot,
Amish

Why not enumerate the tab's children?

Oops-

Code:

BOOL EnumChildWindows(
  HWND hWndParent,         // handle to parent window
  WNDENUMPROC lpEnumFunc,  // pointer to callback function
  LPARAM lParam            // application-defined value
);

As I recall PostMessage() places the message in the queue for the thread associated with the Window. Supposedly it would still get to the windows callback function when the message loop in the thread gets to DispatchMessage(). SendMessage() on the other hand sends it directly to the threads callback function. Another advantae to SendMessage() is that it will wait until the callback function finishes before returning, this has the advantage of allowing you to recieve data using the message for cases like WM_GETTEXT messages. PostMessage() puts the message in the queue and returns, the message will have the same effect you just can't be sure when/if you will get any results back.

Another option would be SendDlgItemMessage(), doesn't get you the handle however you don't need the child's handle to send the message. You just need the handle to the main window and the integer identifier specified when you created teh child window, you can check out that function on MSDN.

Back to the question you really asked, you can get teh HWND to the child with GetDlgItem(), you specify the handle to the parent window and the identifier for the child and it returns the HWND to the child object. Read about it here.

Originally Posted by Ichmael™

Oops-

Code:

BOOL EnumChildWindows(
  HWND hWndParent,         // handle to parent window
  WNDENUMPROC lpEnumFunc,  // pointer to callback function
  LPARAM lParam            // application-defined value
);

That would be good if I wanted to send the message to all the children but I need to send it to only 1 of them.
Amish

[QUOTE=Exile]
Another option would be SendDlgItemMessage(), doesn't get you the handle however you don't need the child's handle to send the message. You just need the handle to the main window and the integer identifier specified when you created teh child window, you can check out that function on MSDN.
QUOTE]

SendDlgItemMessage() seems like a good way of doing it. I currently found a way of sending the message to the main parent and then have the main dispatch it to the child window using SendMessageToDescendants(WM_TIMER,nIDEvent,0,true, false)
It's a good workaround for now. I will still need to pinpoint the messages to one particular child though and that's where SendDlgItemMessage() might come in useful. Thanks
Amish

Originally Posted by axr0284

That would be good if I wanted to send the message to all the children but I need to send it to only 1 of them.
Amish

You can use it to get the HWND of the child windows. The call back function is given the HWND value of each of the child windows and its numeric identifier. So you could then find the HWND you needed and send the message.

That way might be a bit complicated because the callback is told about one of the child windows at a time. If you were doing bulk sending to all the messages it would be easy here, but targetting a specific window might be a bit trickier.