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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-23T16:32:24+00:00

When the user clicks the OK or APPLY button on a property sheet and

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When the user clicks the OK or APPLY button on a property sheet and the program determines data on some page is invalid, how can I cause the page containing the error to be displayed along with a message box describing the error?

Currently the procedure doing the validation does the following while processing the PSN_APPLY notification.

MessageBox (hDlg, "Data must be positive!", "Error", MB_OK);
SetWindowLong (hDlg, DWL_MSGRESULT, PSNRET_INVALID);

This works ok if the page doing the validation (A) is currently displayed but if some other page (B) is being displayed, the message box appears with that page (B) being displayed, then when the message box is answered, the page with the validation error (A) is displayed. I thought about setting some flag so that when that page (A) gets the PSN_SETACTIVE notification it displays the message box but that seems kind of hokey.

Win32 API in c++, no MFC, no NET, nothing fancy.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I think the problem is in the design of your validation and it’s presentation.

    Am I right in thinking that you iterate through your property sheets, validate them and display a message box if something is awry? Because of course, what you have witnessed will happen, if I am on property page 3 and I wrote crap in to a field on property page 1.

    The easiest solution is, when validating, note which property page the field in question is, and set that one active if the user has written crap in to one of your fields. This seems the fastest way possible.

    Also, rather than spring up an annoying message box, reserve some room beneath the property pages to display a textual (red or otherwise) warning as to why, and then change to the appropriate property page, and highlight the offending control. Your validation routine can do this nice and easily as it loops through.

    Even better, don’t stop at the first error. One thing I HATE is correcting one field that I think is the only issue, only to be told every time I hit “OK” or “SUBMIT” that there’s something else I missed.

    I seriously think you should consider going the extra mile here… loop through ALL controls, and add all invalid ones to a list. Then change each offending control’s background colour, tab colour etc… Then the user can work through and correct, no matter how many errors he or she made.

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