Conflict with DrawText function

Question

I am developing a multi-platform application and in one component I have a class method called DrawText. Unfortunately, I get a linker error (on windows only) saying that there is an unresolved external symbol for a DrawTextW method of this class.

I've seen this before with other methods ending in "Text" where it is looking for either a FooTextW or FooTextA method instead of the FooText method I defined. My assumption is that somewhere in the Windows headers there is a macro definition assigning FooText to FooTextW or FooTextA based on some other definition.

Aside from renaming my function (which is what I did in the past), does anybody have any good ideas for getting around this issue?

Thanks.

Joe

Answer 1

You really only have two choices:

#ifdef DrawText
#undef DrawText
#endif

Or rename your function. Win32 uses macros which have no namespacing or scoping, so you're kinda stuck.

We just re-name our functions.

BTW: It's based on #ifdef UNICODE usually (or _UNICODE or a few other variants).

Answer 2

Yes, this is a real problem with using Windows, and there's no way to turn it off since the headers all look like this:

#ifdef UNICODE
#define GetDlgItemText GetDlgItemTextW
#else
#define GetDlgItemText GetDlgItemTextA
#endif

So you're going to get the symbol defined either way. It would be very nice if you could #define something before #include'ing windows.h that turns this behavior off, but alas none exists.