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The CSeparator class is an enhancement to standard static text controls that duplicates the look of the Office 97 products' options screens, like Word (pictured).
This separator element is a nice alternative when you want to avoid really big or nested group boxes, or just
look like you're keeping up with Microsoft's ever-changing UI designs. ;)
This class is an extension to Hans Buehler's original article "Control for drawing a bevel line." One of the enhancements he mentioned was adding
text to horizontal lines, so that's what I've done!
CSeparator was written with MSVC 5.0. The code will work in Unicode apps, and should compile fine with 6.0 as
well.
Example
When laying out a vertical separator, make the static control as tall as you want the line to be. The line will
be drawn horizontally centered in the control, so it's a good idea to make the control the minimum width of 8 DLUs
so you can judge where the line will appear. Vertical separators do not display text.
When laying out horizontal separators, place your static controls as usual, but make them as wide as you want
the horizontal line to be. You can also set the alignment of the text (left, center, or right), and set the No
Prefix style if you want. Those are the only static control styles supported at this time. If you do not set the
No Prefix style, then you can use a shortcut key (i.e., put a & before a letter) just as with normal static
text controls.
A sample dialog is pictured below, first in the resource editor, and then with the separators in action.
Each static control that will be used as a separator should have a real unique ID (not IDC_STATIC). Using ClassWizard,
create member variables of type CStatic for each separator, and then go to the ClassWizard-generated code and change
the type of the variables to CSeparator. That's it!
Future Enhancements
I tried for a little while to get vertically-drawn text, but it was pretty tricky to get the text aligned correctly
over the line. Drawing the text rotated is no problem (as long as you select a TrueType font into the DC!) but
the horizontal position of the text depends on the length of the text. The CSeparator class has some code to draw
text vertically, although it is commented out since it doesn't work exactly right. It's just there as a starting
point for anyone brave enough to take on the challenge. See the OnPaint() function for the code snippet and some
comments.
Michael lives in sunny Mountain View, California. He started programming with an Apple
//e in 4th grade, graduated from
UCLA with a math degree in 1994, and immediately landed a job as a QA engineer at Symantec, working on the Norton AntiVirus team. He pretty much taught himself Windows and MFC programming, and in 1999 he designed and coded a new interface for Norton AntiVirus 2000.
Mike has been a a developer at
Napster and at his own lil' startup, Zabersoft, a development company he co-founded with offices in Los Angeles and Odense, Denmark. Mike is now a senior engineer at
VMware.
He also enjoys his hobbies of playing pinball, bike riding, photography, and Domion on Friday nights (current favorite combo: Village + double Pirate Ship). He would get his own snooker table too if they weren't so darn big! He is also sad that he's forgotten the languages he's studied: French, Mandarin Chinese, and Japanese.
Mike was a
VC MVP from 2005 to 2009.