Question

I know one can use SetWindowLongPtr + GWLP_USERDATA to store a pointer which points to some data.
But could one store the data directly, for example “a handle”, “a bool, an “int” or other larger data.

From http://msdn.microsoft.com/zh-tw/library/windows/desktop/ms644898%28v=vs.85%29.aspx, it says:

Sets new extra information that is private to the application, such as handles or pointers.

, so I guess to store a handle is OK. I also used this method to store an RGB value without problem.
But I don’t know if this is a good idea to do things like this. And can we store other data which is large (for example, a structure)?

p.s: The motivation of this question is: When I create a dialog window, I want to store data for each of its controls. Of course I can use static variables in the window procedure and pass pointer (to them) to SetWindowLongPtr function. But this is not “perfect” in theory, because when the dialog window is closed, I don’t need these data anymore. Of course, in practice, the data I need to use is very small, and I should not care about the usage of memory. But I still like to know if there is a better way.

Answer 1

The SetWindowLongPtr function can store a piece of data which has the same size as LONG_PTR (most likely 32bit or 64bit). If your data can be stored in that size, you’re fine. I.e. a bool would be fine, so would most handles (since handles tend to be pointers, too).

A typical RGB value would work as well since it’s stored as three bytes (one byte per color component) or four bytes (an extra byte for the alpha channel).

If you need more space than this, you should allocate a structure somewhere else and store a pointer to that structure.