Exposing Owner-Drawn Menu Items

Application developers can use the MSAAMENUINFO structure to expose the names of owner-drawn menu items. By associating this structure with the owner-drawn menu item data, you do not need to expose the menu items with IAccessible.

When creating an owner-drawn menu, define a class or structure for the owner-drawn menu item data and create instances of this class for each menu item. Pass in a pointer to the item data when adding items to the menu.

To expose the names of the menu items, the MSAAMENUINFO structure must be the first member of the structure that defines the application-specific item data, as shown in the following example:

// Application-specific owner-drawn menu info struct. Owner-drawn data 
// is a pointer to one of these.
struct MenuEntry
{
    MSAAMENUINFO m_MSAA;       // MSAA info - must be first member
    LPTSTR       m_pName;      // Displayed menu text or NULL for
                               //   separator item
    int          m_CmdID;      // Menu command ID
    int          m_IconIndex;  // Index of icon in bitmap or -1 for
                               //   for separator
};

The MSAAMENUINFO structure cannot be a member in a class that contains virtual functions. When the code is compiled, the first member of the class is always a compiler-generated pointer to a table of the virtual functions. To work around this problem, create an item data structure that contains MSAAMENUINFO as the first member. The second member is a pointer to an instance of the class that defines the owner-drawn data. The following example demonstrates this technique.

// Application-defined class that contains the owner-drawn data and 
//  virtual functions that operate on that data. 
class MenuEntry
{
    LPTSTR       m_pName;      // Displayed menu text or NULL for
                               //  separator item.
    int          m_CmdID;      // Menu command ID
    int          m_IconIndex;  // Index of icon in bitmap or -1 for
                               //  separator item
    virtual void m_AnimateIcon();  
    virtual void m_ChangeIconColor();
}

// Application-defined struct that contains MSAAMENUINFO as first 
//  member. Second member points to owner-drawn data.
struct MenuInfo
{
    MSAAMENUINFO m_MSAA;       // MSAA info - must be first member
    MenuEntry *pMenuData;      // Points to the owner-drawn data
}

When adding items to the menu, pass a pointer to an instance of the structure that contains MSAAMENUINFO to expose the names of the menu items.