Use dialog controls without stealing focus

Question

I have a modeless CDialog that contains controls, some CButtons and a CScrollbar. The CDialog is parented off of an edit box that I want to keep focus at all times. The problem is that whenever the user uses the controls, clicking a button or on the scrollbar, the control steals focus from the edit box, causing both the parent window to draw without focus (grayed-out header bar), and causing the control to take all the keyboard input. Is there a way for the controls to respond to mouse actions but not steal focus?

The controls and the dialog are all created with WS_CHILD. The controls are parented off the dialog, and the dialog is parented off of the edit box.

I've tried setting focus back after the controls are used, but that causes the parent window to flicker as it loses and then regains focus. Basically I want something that works like a combo box, where the scroll bar can be clicked or dragged around, but keyboard input still goes to the dialog itself, not just the scroll bar, and the whole thing never loses focus.

Answer 1

I haven't done anything like this for a long time, so I'm sure there are a million little details, but I think the starting point is to override the handling of WM_MOUSEACTIVATE.

Answer 2

I am a little confused about child-parent relationship you described. Can you explain what do you mean by: The CDialog is parented off of an edit box that I want to keep focus at all times

Any window hosting other windows inside of the client area is a parent of those windows. It is impossible to create window without WS_CHILD that is contained by other window. Therefore all dialog’s controls are children of this dialog. It is also possible that child window hosts another child window.

CDialog is just an MFC representation of a dialog window; the same applies to other controls. For example CButton is an MFC class that wraps handle of the window’s window that is predefined as window button control.

Dialog never has focus unless is empty (does not have any controls). If dialog contains even one control, this control always has focus.

What focus means is that any given window receives mouse and keyboard messages. Only one control can have focus at any given time. In order for scroll bar to process mouse click or keyboard to move slider, scroll bar must have focus; therefore some other control must give it up. Combo box drop box (I think this is what you are referring to) is not a child of the dialog. It is a popup window that for the duration has keyboard focus and captures mouse. When it drops down, dialog is deactivated and once dropdown hides, dialog state is changed back to active hence focus never changes, it returns to the control that had focus when dialog was deactivated.

What you are trying to do is probably possible but it would require a lot of coding. Probably hooking messages would do the job but I think it would be going against the stream.