HOWTO: Suppress Default Pop-up Menu When Using Custom Menu

• Microsoft Visual Basic Learning, Professional, and Enterprise Editions for Windows, versions 5.0, 6.0

SUMMARY

Some Visual Basic controls, such as the TextBox, have a default pop-up menu that will automatically be display when you alternate-mouse click on the control. This article demonstrates one way to disable this default pop-up menu in order that either no menu or only a custom pop-up menu is displayed.

MORE INFORMATION

When you alternate-mouse click on the TextBox control, its default pop-up menu will be displayed. Visual Basic does not have a property or any other built-in mechanism that directly disables this feature. However, setting the control's Enabled property to False will prevent the menu from being displayed although this allows the user to see that the control is disabled.

One workaround is to use the Windows LockWindowUpdate API in conjunction with the Enabled property. The LockWindowUpdate function disables or re- enables drawing in a specified window. After the operation is complete, the control is re-enabled and the LockWindowUpdate API is called a second time to resume drawing of the control.

Steps to Create Sample Project

1. Start a new Standard EXE project in Visual Basic. Form1 is created by default.



2. Add a TextBox control to Form1.



3. Choose Menu Editor from the Tools menu and create a menu named mnuPopUp on Form1. Deselect the Visible CheckBox and add items such as the following:
   

   
        File
           New
           Open
    




4. Add the following code to the code window of Form1:
   

   
         Private Declare Function LockWindowUpdate Lib "user32" _
            (ByVal hwndLock As Long) As Long
   
         Private Sub mnuOne_Click()
            Text1.Text = "Menu One was clicked"
         End Sub
   
         Private Sub mnuTwo_Click()
            Text1.Text = "Menu two was clicked"
         End Sub
   
         Private Sub Text1_MouseDown(Button As Integer, Shift As Integer, _
            X As Single, Y As Single)
   
            If Button = vbRightButton Then
            ' Avoid the 'disabled' gray text by locking updates
               LockWindowUpdate Text1.hWnd
   
               ' A disabled TextBox will not display a context menu
               Text1.Enabled = False
   
               ' Give the previous line time to complete
               DoEvents
   
               ' Display our own context menu
               PopupMenu mnuPopup
   
               ' Enable the control again
               Text1.Enabled = True
   
               ' Unlock updates
               LockWindowUpdate 0&
            End If
         End Sub
    




5. Save and run the project.



6. Alternate-mouse click on Text1. Only the custom menu is displayed. The standard editing menu is not shown.

REFERENCES

For additional information, please see the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

Q170570 : HOWTO: Build a Windows Message Handler with AddressOf in VB

Q155969 : HOWTO: Distribute the WebBrowser Control

Additional query words: kbDSupport kbDSD kbVBp600 kbInternet kbVBp kbVBp400 kbVBp500 kbAPI kbVBp
kbSDKWin32 kbMenu

Keywords : kbGrpVB
Version :
Platform : WINDOWS
Issue type : kbhowto