Is there a way to preserve the BITMAPFILEHEADER when loading a Bitmap as a Windows resource?

Question

I've been working on testing a few things out using SFML 1.4 (Simple and Fast Multimedia Library) with C++ and Visual C++ 2008 Express Edition. To avoid having external images with my graphical programs, I was testing out the sf::Image::LoadFromMemory(const char * Data, std::size_t SizeInBytes) function with Bitmap resources loaded using a simple resource script:

IDB_SPRITE BITMAP "sprite1.bmp"

In my code to load the image to create an sf::Image using this bitmap resource, I use the following procedure, consisting of Win32 API functions (I've excluded the code that checks to make sure the Win32 functions don't return NULL to shorten this a bit):

HRSRC hResInfo = FindResource(NULL, MAKEINTRESOURCE(IDB_SPRITE), RT_BITMAP);
HGLOBAL hResData = LoadResource(NULL, hResInfo);
char * resourceData = reinterpret_cast<char *>(LockResource(hResData));

After that, I use the sf::Image::LoadFromMemory function:

MyImage.LoadFromMemory(resourceData, SizeofResource(NULL, hResInfo));

However, this doesn't work (I get an unknown file type error). After some testing, I discovered that the bitmap data I pass to the LoadFromMemory function does not include the BITMAPFILEHEADER (the first 14 bytes), and I believe this is the cause of the unknown file type error.

I can restore the BITMAPFILEHEADER manually and get the LoadFromMemory function to work fine. However, I'm wondering if there is some way to preserve the BITMAPFILEHEADER in the resource data to avoid doing this?

Answer 1

You can add file to resources as a custom resource instead of RT_BITMAP -- this will add file exactly as it is. Unless you also need to ::LoadImage() it.

Answer 2

Using a custom resource type will preserve the entire file. Change the resource script to utilize the RCDATA type as opposed to the BITMAP type:

IDB_SPRITE RCDATA "sprite1.bmp"

In the FindResource function call, use RT_RCDATA instead of RT_BITMAP:

HRSRC hResInfo = FindResource(NULL, MAKEINTRESOURCE(IDB_SPRITE), RT_RCDATA);

For more information:

RCDATA Resource

Resource Types