Relationship control

I always imagined that to make a control like that you would need to do a lot of custom drawing, but when using the Spy++ tool from the Developer Studio package, I soon realized that the control was nothing but a parent window with a number of child windows attached. The child windows can be any kind of Windows control (including list boxes and regular windows). The tables in the MS Access control are actually subclassed List box controls with the WS_CHILD, WS_CAPTION and WS_OVERLAPPED window styles. These styles give the window the resizing edges, caption and floating capabilities.

My Relationship control also has support for a list box child control. I also added a subclassed regular window, which allows me to paint a nicely centred caption.

The binders (or arrows) that connect the windows are still custom drawn. They are drawn on the parent window's Device Context (DC) so they don't interfere with the painting of the floating child window controls.

This was my first attempt to make a control using the Microsoft WTL library.
This class library, made in the template-spirit of ATL, really produces nice and fast code. But if you use it, be prepared to spend time on scanning through its source code, because it is still poorly documented and has a very cumbersome architecture.

Source Code Dependencies

Download Files

Source Code (53 Kb)