HOWTO: Initialize Menus Dynamically

• Microsoft Windows Software Development Kit (SDK)
• Microsoft Win32 Software Development Kit (SDK)

SUMMARY

Many commercial applications developed for Windows allow the user to customize the menus of the application. This ability introduces some complexity when the application must disable particular menu items at certain times. This article provides a method to perform this task.

Windows sends a WM_INITMENUPOPUP message just before a pop-up menu is displayed. The parameters to this message provide the handle to the menu and the index of the pop-up menu on the main menu.

To process this message properly, each menu item must have a unique identifier. When the application starts up, it creates a mapping array that lists the items on each menu. When the WM_INITMENUPOPUP message is received, the application checks the conditions necessary for each menu item to be disabled or checked and modifies the menu appropriately.

The application must maintain the mapping array when the user modifies the menus in any way.

Keywords          : kbMenu kbNTOS kbGrpUser kbWinOS kbWndw kbWndwMsg 
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Issue type        : kbhowto 

Last Reviewed: March 7, 1999