Creating a ruler bar in MFC

Question

What's the best way to go about creating a vertical and horizontal ruler bars in an SDI app? Would you make it part of the frame or the view? Derive it from CControlBar, or is there a better method?

The vertical ruler must also be docked to a pane and not the frame.

To make it a little clearer as to what I'm after, imagine the vertical ruler in the Dialog Editor in Visual Studio (MFC only). It gets repositioned whenever the tree view is resized.

Answer 1

I would not use control bars. I have no good reason other then (IMOHO) are difficult to get to do what you want - if what you want if something other than a docking toolbar.

I would just draw them directly on the View window using GDI calls.

I guess I might think about making each ruler its own window, and draw the rulers on their own window. I would then create these two CWnd derived classes in the view and position as child windows. This is good if you want to interact with the mouse on these rulers (easier to sort out what messages are for the rulers).

Answer 2

I ended up deriving the ruler from CWnd as you suggested and skipping the control bar route. This code works in either case:

m_wndSplitter.CreateStatic(this, 1, 3);

m_wndLeftPane.Create(&m_wndSplitter,WS_CHILD|WS_VISIBLE,m_wndSplitter.IdFromRowCol(0, 0));
m_ruler.Create(&m_wndSplitter,WS_CHILD|WS_VISIBLE,m_wndSplitter.IdFromRowCol(0, 1));

m_wndSplitter.CreateView(0, 2, pContext->m_pNewViewClass, CSize(300, 0), pContext);
SetActiveView((CScrollView*)m_wndSplitter.GetDlgItem(m_wndSplitter.IdFromRowCol(0, 2)));

Thank you.