Trapping for checkbox events in CTreeCtrl's

I found an article on MSDN about this and was wondering if any of you know of a better way.

I have a CTreeCtrl with checkboxes for each node. The idea is to trap for the checkbox click event. MSDN makes it sound as if I must trap for this in the main message handler for the window. They show code that traps the WM_NOTIFY message, hit tests the mouse position and verifies the message came from the tree control. Then they test the flags of the TVHITTESTINFO structure to see if the TVHT_ONITEMSTATEICON bit is set. Once it is they post a user defined message to the window indicating a click on the checkbox. The window then has code to handle the user message and acts accordingly.

What a mess eh?

Is there a better way? Based on the pure Win32 example from MS I will have quite a bit of work to do in order to get this to work in MFC. I would have to make use of PreTranslateMessage to trap for the WM_NOTIFY and then verify the message came from my tree control. I would then need code in the same function to then call the handler for the user defined message. I've attached a screenshot of my app so you can understand what I'm using this control for. I used to use a simple list box but checking which layers are visible and which ones are not seems a lot more intuitive than a simple list of the layers. Ideally the check event would enable or disable the desired layer in my view on the right.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/261289/en

I do this with Listviews not Treeviews but the principal should be the same....

Code:

---

//is a WM_NOTIFY handler in the message map
ON_NOTIFY(LVN_ITEMCHANGED, IDC_EVENTLIST, OnLvnItemchangedEventlist)

//the handler
void EventLinker::OnLvnItemchangedEventlist(NMHDR *pNMHDR, LRESULT *pResult)
{
        LPNMLISTVIEW pNMLV = reinterpret_cast<LPNMLISTVIEW>(pNMHDR);
        NM_LISTVIEW* pNMListView = (NM_LISTVIEW*)pNMHDR;
        *pResult = 0;

        if (pNMListView->uOldState == 0 && pNMListView->uNewState == 0)
                return;        // No change

        BOOL bPrevState = (BOOL)(((pNMListView->uOldState & LVIS_STATEIMAGEMASK)>>12)-1);  // Old check box state
        if (bPrevState < 0)        // On startup there's no previous state
                bPrevState = 0; // so assign as false (unchecked)

        // New check box state
        BOOL bChecked=(BOOL)(((pNMListView->uNewState & LVIS_STATEIMAGEMASK)>>12)-1);
        if (bChecked < 0) // On non-checkbox notifications assume false
                bChecked = 0;

        if (bPrevState == bChecked) // No change in check box
                return;

        //else remember a value changed for the save state method
        m_iChanged=true;

        *pResult = 0;
}

---

Thanks.

I got it to work yesterday using the samples from MSDN and then found that simply testing the flags in the header passed to OnNMClickTree() and testing against TVHT_ONITEMSTATEICON works just as well.

But you are correct in that list controls and tree controls are identical in underlying operation. In fact you can use LVNI_SELECTED with a tree control when that is specifically for a list control.

I was trying to derive the index of the currently selected item by using GetNextItem(0,LVNI_SELECTED) but it was not working. So now I'm setting the item data in the node using SetItemData() and using a structure which contains the index of the item. Since all of my items are root items and do not have any child items I set the index member of the structure to CTreeCtrl::GetItemCount(). It works exactly as I had hoped.