Some Visual Basic controls, such as the
TextBox control, have a default pop-up menu that automatically appears when you right-click on the control. This article demonstrates one way to disable this default pop-up
menu in order that a custom pop-up menu is displayed.
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When you right-click on the
TextBox control, its default pop-up
menu is displayed. Visual Basic does not have a property or any other
built-in mechanism that directly disables this feature. However, setting
the control's
Enabled property to
False prevents the menu from being displayed, although this allows the user to see that the control is disabled.
One workaround is to use the Windows
LockWindowUpdate application programming interface (API) in conjunction with the
Enabled property. The
LockWindowUpdate function disables or re-
enables drawing in a specified window. After the operation is complete, the
control is re-enabled, and the
LockWindowUpdate API is called a second time to resume drawing of the control.
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Steps to Create Sample Project
| 1. | Start a new Standard EXE project in Visual Basic. Form1 is created by default. |
| 2. | Add a TextBox control to Form1. |
| 3. | Click Menu Editor from the Tools menu, and create a menu named mnuPopUp on Form1. Clear the Visible check box, and add items such as the following: Caption: Name
File: mnuPopup
New: mnuOne
Open: MnuTwo
|
| 4. | Add the following code to the code window of Form1:
Private Declare Function LockWindowUpdate Lib "user32" _
(ByVal hwndLock As Long) As Long
Private Sub mnuOne_Click()
Text1.Text = "Menu One was clicked"
End Sub
Private Sub mnuTwo_Click()
Text1.Text = "Menu two was clicked"
End Sub
Private Sub Text1_MouseDown(Button As Integer, Shift As Integer, _
X As Single, Y As Single)
If Button = vbRightButton Then
' Avoid the 'disabled' gray text by locking updates
LockWindowUpdate Text1.hWnd
' A disabled TextBox will not display a context menu
Text1.Enabled = False
' Give the previous line time to complete
DoEvents
' Display our own context menu
PopupMenu mnuPopup
' Enable the control again
Text1.Enabled = True
' Unlock updates
LockWindowUpdate 0&
End If
End Sub
|
| 5. | Save and run the project. |
| 6. | Right-click on Text1. Only the custom menu is displayed. The standard editing menu is not shown. |
Alternatively, you can subclass the control to supress the default pop-up menu. Through subclassing, you can monitor for the appropriate mouse messages and handle them accordingly. See the "References" section to follow for more information on this topic.
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For additional information, please see the following article in the
Microsoft Knowledge Base:
170570 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/170570/EN-US/)
How To Build a Windows Message Handler with AddressOf in Visual Basic
155969 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/155969/EN-US/)
How To Distribute the WebBrowser Control
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