How do you programmatically set the "visible" attribute in CDialog?

This is not sufficient for me and I will explain to you why.

I have an application that while it is booting up - I create a dialog with a third party graph in it. Right after I create it - I then destroy it. The reason for this is that the first time this third party graph is brought up - it takes a long time for it to be displayed - so I create this graph during the bringing up of the application - so that later on - it will be displayed instantly. Now when I use ShowWindow(SW_HIDE) - the dialog is still shown for about a second on the screen and this looks very ugly. On the other hand - setting in the resource the visible flag as being off - causes not even a split second displaying of the dialog. I assume that the reason for this is that ShowWindow() requires that the dialog's m_hWnd exists and this means that for the initial first second of creation of the dialog we will see the window before ShowWindow will do its thing.

So is there some type of way to set the dialog as being not visible before it turns into a m_hWnd?

P.S. Note that I could make the Visible attribute in the resource be turned off and for later on in the program - I could do ShowWindow(SW_SHOW) - but then this leads to other problems that if a lot of CPU is being used - then it takes a long time before the window is shown for later on in the program - or at times the window appears behind the application - the reason for this is the same problem - that ShowWindow() requires that the dialog's m_hWnd exists.

Originally posted by darian
GetDlgItem( IDC_BUTTON ) -> ShowWindow( true );
GetDlgItem( IDC_BUTTON ) -> EnableWindow( true );

IDC_BUTTON can be the name of a static text, window or button.
true will show and false will hide. same as enable.

Note that you should avoid using the C++ boolean types while dealing with MFC...since it uses the Microsoft types instead - and these are different (-> integers)...

So is there some type of way to set the dialog as being not visible before it turns into a m_hWnd?

Override PreCreateWindow in your dialog class, this allows you to modify the style before the window is created.

You should be able to remove the WS_VISIBLE style at this point.

That's very strange; PreCreateWindows runs before the window is created so I don't understand why the style change isn't applied until after the window is created.

Try this:

In your PreCreateWindow function, move the window off-screen:

cs.x = ::GetSystemMetrics(SM_CXSCREEN) +10;
cs.y = ::GetSystemMetrics(SM_CYSCREEN) +10;

Hopefully this will do the trick.

Another suggestion would be to duplicate the resource (giving it a different ID) and set one of them to be invisible. Change the dialog constructor to take the resource as an argument. The first time you can use the resource that has been set to not be visible, after that use the resource that is visible.

Did you try the duplicate resource trick?

That should work 100%.