Question

I’m creating a custom control in wxWidgets that displays a menu as part of it, and currently working on the Windows side of things. wxWidgets doesn’t have a way of setting the width of a menu. It just makes the window as wide as the longest string plus a few pixels on either side.

In the API, there is a way to get the actual Windows API menu handle. Does the Windows API have a method of setting the width of a menu other than just calculating it on its own based on the width of the string?

Answer 1

With the handle of the menu, you can cycle through the menu items and call SetMenuItemInfo, indicating that you want to owner-draw the menu items. When you do this, the window that the menu is attached to will receive the WM_MEASUREITEM message, which you would then respond to by setting the dimensions required for the menu. It is here you can set your width.

Of course, this means you have to subclass the windows message handler for the window that contains the menu.