Scanf Masked Edit control

If you have ever worked with parsing text files, you have probably stumbled upon the sprintf and sscanf C functions. They have neat and often quite desirable formatting capabilities, so it's a pity we don't have anything like it to put on the user interface.

When looking for a Windows control that would lend me some standard formatting, the closest that comes to the mind is the Date Time Picker control.
The Date Time Picker control does allow some degree of customization, but its far too difficult to cram out your own data types/behaviour of each cell, so this new control does have its place. This new Scanf control can simulate the DTP control, but also allows you to format your own cell types using ordinary scanf formatting rules and even extend it with new types.

Now, many UI fanatics don't really like the Date Time Picker control at all, arguing that it does not follow the standard caret navigation or clipboard manipulation rules. This is true, and it does need a bit of "getting use to"-time before most users feel comfortable with its inner workings. Still, I agree that the cursor key navigation is controversial in a standard UI, but you'll just have to live with it.

Formatting

%[-][#][0][width][.precision]type

Each field is a single character or a number signifying a particular format option. The type characters that appear after the last optional format field determine whether the associated argument is interpreted as a character, a string, or a number. The simplest format specification contains only the percent sign and a type character (for example, %s). The optional fields control other aspects of the formatting. Following are the optional and required fields and their meanings.

Formatting

%3d . %3d . %3d . %3d
An IP Address entry.


%02d. %m %y
A date entry that displays day, month and year.


Execute every: %w
Displays the weekday.

Using the control

CScanfEditCtrl m_ctlEdit1;

  LRESULT OnInitDialog(UINT /*uMsg*/, 
                       WPARAM /*wParam*/, 
                       LPARAM /*lParam*/, 
                       BOOL& /*bHandled*/)
  {
    ...
    m_ctlEdit1.SubclassWindow(GetDlgItem(IDC_EDIT1));
    ...
  }

The control gets its initial formatting string from the window text, however you can use the SetFormat method to change it later on.

To retrieve the values from the cells, you have two choices:
Either you traverse the items (cells) and retrieve the item text. This is easily done using the GetItemCount() and GetItem() methods.
The other way to do it is using the (type unsafe) scanf member method.

  int ip1, ip2, ip3, ip4;
  m_ctrlIpAddress.scanf(TRUE, &ip1, &ip2, &ip3, &ip4);


  int day, month, year;
  m_ctrlDateEdit.scanf(TRUE, &day, &month, &year);

Source Code Dependencies

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Source Code (9 Kb)