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Hi, I have seen that you can change the orange color of buttons in the Obsidian theme by creating your own paint manager and changing the InitTranslatedColors function, but is there a way to create different colored buttons in the same theme at the same time?

I would like to create buttons with different functionality and give instant recognition to the user through the background colour of the button on the same dialog, perhaps also having the option to change the foreground color too. In our application there is likely to be 50 to 100 buttons on a form so the easier the better!

Thanks

Ian

I did get this to work in the end...just being a dork!

However I would still like to know whether there is a cleaner solution for this.

Thanks

Ian

No, there are no other solutions but overriding the PaintPushButton() virtual method.

What I would prefer is for the button to draw itself using the selected paint manager, apart from when the background color has been forced. This means on creation the buttons would all be the same and the program would dynamically how the button was displayed depending on the background color.

In order to experiment with this I changed the ExtPaintManager.cpp file in the library to change the behaviour of the CExtPaintManagerOffice2007_R2_Obsidian::PaintPushButton() function.

The first few lines were changed to:

ASSERT_VALID( 
ASSERT( dc.GetSafeHdc() != NULL );
 this );// If user has forced back color then move from theme
 
    PaintNormalPushButton( dc, _ppbd );if( _ppbd.m_clrForceBk != ((COLORREF)-1L ) )

and the CExtPaintManager::PaintPushButton() function was copied to the new CExtPaintManagerOffice2007_R2_Obsidian::PaintNormalPushButton() function.

When I tried this using a modified version of the Prof-UIS Controls project, the new function was being called but the buttons did not change their appearance, ie they displayed the bitmap regardless of the background color being set.

Can you see why this would not work or if there is a cleaner way to do this?

Thanks

Actually you don’t need to copy the content of the CExtPaintManagerOffice2007_R2_Obsidian::PaintPushButton() method. Just invoke the base class method as below:

void CExtPaintManagerOffice2007_R2_Obsidian::PaintPushButton(
            CDC & dc,
            CExtPaintManager::PAINTPUSHBUTTONDATA & _ppbd
            )
{
            ASSERT_VALID( this );
            ASSERT( dc.GetSafeHdc() != NULL );

            …
            …

            if( _ppbd.m_clrForceBk != ((COLORREF)-1L ) )
CExtPaintManager::PaintPushButton(
                                    dc,
                                    _ppbd
                                    );

            …
            …

The code snippet in the previous post is out of order for some reason and should read

ASSERT_VALID( this );
ASSERT( dc.GetSafeHdc() != NULL );
// If user has forced back color then move from theme
if(  _ppbd.m_clrForceBk != ((COLORREF)-1L ) )
PaintNormalPushButton( dc, _ppbd );

Although the CExtButton::_RenderImpl() virtual method is used for drawing the button in fact it is drawn by the currently selected paint manager (in the CExtPaintManager::PaintPushButton() virtual method where it is overridden in the corresponding paint manager classes). So you can create a CExtButton-derived class and override the _RenderImpl() virtual method. There you can copy the code from CExtPaintManagerSkin::PaintPushButton() and change the part where the background is painted. The new painting algorithm should check some button property and paint the background differently.

Note there is another way. You can use the CExtButton::SetBkColor() method for changing the background color. But the SetBkColor() method works only for the Office 2000/XP/2003 and Visual Studio 2005 themes. Otherwise it is useless because the buttons in the Office 2007 themes are based on bitmaps stored in Prof-UIS resources and APIs like button background color does not work in these themes. In this case you can directly assign the paint manager that will be used by button. You can read more about this here http://www.prof-uis.com/prof-uis/tech-support/support-forum/using-more-than-one-paint-manager-59534.aspx

Yes. But overriding for 50 to 100 buttons... It`s crazy work.

Hi. ProfUIS is not support manual skinning of different controls. But it has been researched by me... I find some solutions of the problem. See http://www.prof-uis.com/prof-uis/tech-support/general-forum/manual-skinning-of-the-component-57966.aspx#@lt;/p>

If you will be have some questions or notes, pls, post it in this thread.

P.S. I`m not TS.