Windows C++ dialog resizer class

Question

I'm looking for a really good dialog resizer class that will stretch and shrink individual items as needed as the screen is resized. Stephan Keil has a good one (DlgResizeHelper) which basically resizes everything by a set ratio, but I'm looking for something smarter.

For example:

• Icons should not resize

• Single-line text boxes should not be stretched vertically

• Buttons should probably stay the same size

Basically I'm looking for something to look at all of the controls, figure out that a static text field is related to a control next/below it and anchor the two together, and resize large controls in a 'smart' way so it looks good.

Are there such frameworks out there? I've been working on one but something ready-made would probably be better.

FOLLOW UP: I'm looking at the suggested solutions. Many of them require you to go in an anchor each control on the dialog. I'm looking for something smart that will figure out what the anchors ought to be, with the ability to manually anchor if the guesses are wrong. Seems like it should be possible -- most humans would agree a static text field next to an edit field should be anchored together. Guess I'm almost looking for a little AI here :)

Answer 1

You can use wxWidgets. It completely replaces MFC, is multi-platform, and gives you a layout-based dialog mechanism.

Answer 2

I use ResizableLib (also does PropertySheets and Pages) off codeproject, IIRC. You set anchor points that determine how the dialog and controls resize or move as the dialog moves.

You can set up to 2 anchors per control, (left, right) so you can move them as the dialog moves, or resize them as it moves. Its very easy to understand, if difficult to get perfectly right :)

Answer 3

I've tried many and finally settled on http://www.codeproject.com/KB/dialog/layoutmgr.aspx. It doesn't do the 'intelligent' layouting that you suggest though. I've never seen that in any library, on any platform - I don't see how it would work without having lots of under the hood magic that'd have to be overridden half of the time anyway.

Answer 4

The Ultimate Toolbox MFC library (here on CodeProject) includes a layout manager. I haven't used it myself, but it looks like it does what you want.

Answer 5

You can look at Professional GUI we use their class library for resizing our dialog controls. I think that is part of their free version.

Answer 6

We use CResize class from CodeGuru to resize all controls automatically. You tell how you want each control to be resized and it does the job for you.

The resize paradigm is to specify how much each side of a control will move when the dialog is resized.

SetResize(IDC_EDIT1, 0,   0,   0.5, 1);
SetResize(IDC_EDIT2, 0.5, 0,   1,   1);

Very handy when you have a large number of dialog controls.

Source code

Answer 7

This is a free solution also from CodeProject
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/dialog/dlgresizearticle.aspx
It's just a set of simple macros that position controls as the dialog resizes.

Edit - following the OPs comments. I don't know of any general sizer support like QT/WX for MFC, it doesn't seem to be present in new frameworks like Winforms either.
It is in QT/WX because it is necessary for multiplatform where widgets may be a different size, which explains MS lack of it. But it is also vital for multi-language ports, eg. where the German for cancel is 30 characters long.