WinAPI Copy System Menu to new Window

Question

I am docking another application's window inside of my WPF window using HwndHost. To do this, I have to set the WS_CHILD style attribute of the window I am docking and I lose the system menu of that window which is not acceptable. Using HwndHost there is no way around this since it will throw exceptions if that attribute is not set.

My question is;

Since my application doesn't use a system menu, is there any way to directly copy the system menu of the docked application to my app's window? The WinAPI menu functions I'm aware of would all require me to build up the menus from scratch and I don't know how I could hook those menu into the hosted application.

I'm not sure if it matters, but the two windows are within the same process. My application is a plugin of the application window I am docking.

I don't quite understand your framework. Typically, plugins dock into the host, while it sounds like you are docking the host into the plugin. Why? — Eric Brown
[@user...] I also do not understand something: child window can't have (Get/Set)Menu bar, but can (if you really want) to have WS_SYSMENU and accordingly - (Get)SystemMenu... — kero

Tom Seddon Tom Seddon · Accepted Answer · 2013-08-04T01:04:08

Use GetSystemMenu to get an HMENU for the system menu for the given window. You should be able to cross-reference your own window's system menu with the docked application's system menu, copy across any that your own window doesn't have, and forward them on by handling and forwarding the relevant WM_SYSCOMMAND messages. Or maybe just copy the whole system menu and forward all of them on.

This will probably require a bit of trial and error to make it all work (especially if the docked application isn't expecting to be used this way...) but the above might help get things started.

WinAPI Copy System Menu to new Window

1 Answers