Using Property Sheets in Your Application

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The latest version of this topic can be found at Using Property Sheets in Your Application.

To use a property sheet in your application, complete the following steps:

  1. Create a dialog template resource for each property page. Keep in mind that the user may be switching from one page to another, so lay out each page as consistently as possible.

    The dialog templates for all pages do not have to be the same size. The framework uses the size of the largest page to determine how much space to allocate in the property sheet for the property pages.

    When you create the dialog template resource for a property page, you must specify the following styles in the Dialog Properties property sheet:

    • Set the Caption edit box on the General page to the text you wish to appear in the tab for this page.

    • Set the Style list box on the Styles page to Child.

    • Set the Border list box on the Styles page to Thin.

    • Ensure that the Titlebar check box on the Styles page is selected.

    • Ensure that the Disabled check box on the More Styles page is selected.

  2. Create a CPropertyPage-derived class corresponding to each property page dialog template. See Adding a Class. Choose CPropertyPage as the base class.

  3. Create member variables to hold the values for this property page. The process for adding member variables to a property page is exactly the same as adding member variables to a dialog box, because a property page is a specialized dialog box. For more information, see Defining Member Variables for Dialog Controls.

  4. Construct a CPropertySheet object in your source code. Usually, you construct the CPropertySheet object in the handler for the command that displays the property sheet. This object represents the entire property sheet. If you create a modal property sheet with the DoModal function, the framework supplies three command buttons by default: OK, Cancel, and Apply. The framework creates no command buttons for modeless property sheets created with the Create function. You do not need to derive a class from CPropertySheet unless you want to either add other controls (such as a preview window) or display a modeless property sheet. This step is necessary for modeless property sheets because they do not contain any default controls that could be used to close the property sheet.

  5. For each page to be added to the property sheet, do the following:

    • Construct one object for each CPropertyPage-derived class that you created earlier in this process.

    • Call CPropertySheet::AddPage for each page.

    Typically, the object that creates the CPropertySheet also creates the CPropertyPage objects in this step. However, if you implement a CPropertySheet-derived class, you can embed the CPropertyPage objects in the CPropertySheet object and call AddPage for each page from the CPropertySheet-derived class constructor. AddPage adds the CPropertyPage object to the property sheet's list of pages but does not actually create the window for that page. Therefore, it is not necessary to wait until creation of the property sheet window to call AddPage; you can call AddPage from the property sheet's constructor.

    By default, if a property sheet has more tabs than will fit in a single row of the property sheet, the tabs will stack in multiple rows. To disable stacking, call CPropertySheet::EnableStackedTabs with the parameter set to FALSE. You must call EnableStackedTabs when you create the property sheet.

  6. Call CPropertySheet::DoModal or Create to display the property sheet. Call DoModal to create a property sheet as a modal dialog box. Call Create to create the property sheet as a modeless dialog box.

  7. Exchange data between property pages and the owner of the property sheet. This is explained in the article Exchanging Data.

For an example of how to use property sheets, see the MFC General sample PROPDLG.

See Also

Property Sheets