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In my CExtRibbonBar, I want to hide and show buttons dynamically at runtime. What’s the best way to do this?

I tried calling ModifyFlags(__ECTN_TBB_HIDDEN, 0) on the CExtCustomizeCmdTreeNode object, but this doesn’t hide the button immediately; I had to switch to another tab and back before the change became visible.

For the moment, I can work around it by temporarily switching to another page (Ribbon_PageSelectionGet()), hiding the button and switching back.

Yes, this would be a useful feature (although probably too late for our project).

Isn’t there a better way to do this? This sounds quite inelegant to me. My code that builds the ribbon tree (loading it from the resources) is in a central location and used by a dozen different applications. I don’t want to rewrite the code for the creation of the ribbon tree in each application; I just want to hide specific buttons.

The current version of the ribbon bar works with a solid tree data structure that describes the entire ribbon’s content only. In fact, ribbon nodes are persistent, but the ribbon is implemented as a toolbar with a ribbon-like layout. Toolbar buttons are instantiated for the selected ribbon page only. If a ribbon page is unselected, then you can modify its ribbon nodes safely. Otherwise you should reconstruct the ribbon.

We can regard your message as a feature request. It should not be difficult for us to implement this.

You can do this in the same way as when you initialize the ribbon, i.e. you should recreate the ribbon tree and assign it using the CExtRibbonBar::SetButtons() method.