Balloon Tooltip

A tool tip is small help-text window that appears when the cursor pauses over a tool such as a button or a list box. The tool tip control monitors mouse-movements and automatically displays a tool tip if the mouse cursor remains motionless over a tool for a for a predetermined amount of time. The functionality of the tool tips have been implemented in the CToolTipCtrl MFC class.You simply have to create tool tip control and register the tools which you would like to have tool tips displayed and the text to go with them. The tooltip control does the rest. Instead of getting the normal rectangular shaped tooltips in this article we would see a program which displays balloon shaped tooltips. On positioning the mouse on any of the controls for a moment a balloon tooltip appears. To implement the balloon tooltips we have defined a tipwnd class apart from the normal application, frame window and dialog class. The tipwnd class has been derived from the CToolTipCtrl class. The action begins in the mydialog class. In the OnInitDialog( ) function of this class we have created the tooltip window by calling CToolTipCtrl::Create( ). This leads to a call to the tipwnd::OnCreate( ). Here we have created an elliptic region to represent the tooltip window. When the user performs a mouse or a keyboard operation in the dialog box the message is caught by the mydialog::PreTranslateMessage( ). Since we want to exercise control over these messages we have called the tipwnd::RelayEvent( ) function. In the RelayEvent( ) function the most important message that has to be tackled in WM_MOUSEMOVE. Here if it is ascertained that the tooltip window should appear then using the SetWindowPos( ) and the ShowWindow( ) function the elliptical window is displayed. The actual drawing of the elliptic window and displaying of text within it is done by tipwnd::OnPaint( ) function.