Adding a splash screen to your dialog based application

This article including source code copyright � 2001 Codejock Software, All Rights Reserved.  Feel free to use any of the source code found in this article without restriction.

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Introduction

If you have ever created a dialog application, and then tried to add a splash screen using the splash screen component, you may have found out that it won't allow you to.  This article is a quick tip for adding a splash to your dialog application using the CSplashWnd class.  This class is an enhanced version of the one that is normally generated by the splash component for a document view project.

In order to use the CSplashWnd in our dialog based application, we will have to override three functions, CDialog::OnInitDialog(), CWinApp::InitInstance() and CWinApp::PreTranslateMessage(MSG* pMsg).  OnInitDialog and InitInstance should have already been added to your project when you created it if you used the AppWizard, however you may have to add PreTranslateMessage to your CWinApp derived class.

Step 1:

Add the following line of code to your CDialog::OnInitDialog method just before it looses scope.  The first argument to ShowSplashScreen is the time out value in milliseconds, this is how long the splash screen will be displayed before it closes.  The second argument is the resource identifier of the bitmap image that we will be using as the splash screen. The last argument is the parent window, this parameter can be NULL.

// Create and show the splash screen.

CSplashWnd::ShowSplashScreen(3000, IDB_SPLASH24, this);

Step 2:

Add the following line of code, toward the very beginning of the CWinApp::InitInstance, just after the call ParseCommandLine(...).  You will need to add ParseCommandLine if it is not already included.

// Enable the splash screen component based on the command line info.

CCommandLineInfo cmdInfo;
ParseCommandLine(cmdInfo);

CSplashWnd::EnableSplashScreen(cmdInfo.m_bShowSplash);

Step 3:
Use Class Wizard to override CWinApp::PreTranslateMessage(MSG* pMsg), and add the following lines of code:

BOOL CMyApp::PreTranslateMessage(MSG* pMsg) 
{
    // Route messages to the splash screen while it is visible

    if (CSplashWnd::PreTranslateAppMessage(pMsg)) {
        return TRUE;
    }
    
    return CWinApp::PreTranslateMessage(pMsg);
}

History

9 Aug 2002 - rewritten extensively.