CODEWITHSUNDEEP
windowswinapivisual-c++
Abhinay K Reddyreddy
Abhinay K Reddyreddy

Reputation: 511

App modal File dialogs on windows

How do i make the common File dialogs App modal using Common File Dialog API ? The dialogs come up modal with respect to the owner window. I want to block all the process' windows when a file dialog is up. In my current code, I am disabling all windows belonging to the app except the dialog parent and when the dialog is closed I enable them again. There should be a better/easy way of achieving application wide modality with Common File Dialogs. Please let me know if there is a standard solution for this.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 196

Answers (1)

Adrian McCarthy
Adrian McCarthy

Reputation: 48019

Manually disabling and re-enabling is the only way I know of in Windows.

The traditional model for Windows applications is to have a single top-level window per instance. (Remember MDI apps?) Of course, there are exceptions, and many apps have always had floating tool palette windows. Nevertheless, the disable-the-parent model works for the lion's share of applications, and it's possible for many-window apps to do what you're doing with manually disabling the extra windows. Thus there isn't much demand for a more general solution.

If you wanted to re-architect things, you could have a master window that owns all the other top-level windows, and make the modal window use the master as a parent, but then you'd have to solve other problems related to the task bar, z-order, and positioning of the modal window.

Upvotes: 1

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