Custom Location of the Main Menu of Windows Dialog

Question

There are a lot of articles related to customizing main menu of the dialog window on, including "custom-drawn" menus. But none of them seem to answer my question.

I have a (borderless) window that has a custom-drawn by hand title bar:

I need to display somehow a main menu under this "fat" title bar. How could I do this, using MFC? By default "native" menus seem to be able to be located only in the top of the client area of the dialog window (or am I wrong here?). Is there any solution for my problem? If someone could give some links related to my issue, I'd greatly appreciate this! I've seen a lot of products that implement this, for example Ontrack comes on mind, but never met any explanation on how this was achieved. Thank you!

Answer 1

I need to display somehow a main menu under this "fat" title bar.

That's precisely where it is being drawn, according to the image you posted.

By default "native" menus seem to be able to be located only in the top of the client area of the dialog window (or am I wrong here?).

No, that's correct. The menu will be automatically drawn where menu bars belong: at the top of the window, just below the title bar.

You've decided to mess up the defaults and throw usability of your application to hell by reimplementing the non-client area. That means you can't rely on Windows to draw these elements for you. Instead, you'll need to take responsibility for drawing all of these things yourself, which requires you to write code to do so. I don't know what "Ontrack" is, but any application that does this is owner-drawing its menus.

Another popular option (used by Internet Explorer for a while) is to create your own menu-like object using a rebar control. This has the advantage of integrating into an existing toolbar control and allowing the user to rearrange items as desired. It, like writing your own menu control, has the disadvantage of not conforming to standard platform conventions and user expectations (although it's probably a lot better than whatever you can come up with yourself). There's a how-to article here on MSDN.

I suspect that in undertaking this project you've probably bitten off more than you can chew. Keep in mind that there's hardly ever (if even that) a reason to draw your own title bar. As you're seeing, conforming to your platform's standard expectations is often easier on the programmer and far better received by your users.