System Tray Application

Hello all,

How does one begin to program system tray applications? I assume that we don't need a CFrameWnd class at all and we only initialize a CWinApp class. I still have no idea how to begin. Also, google searches do not give me the info i need. There are many headers out there which i can use but i'm keen on learning it.

Thanks in advance.

You at least need a window to receive notifications.

Read up on Shell_NotifyIcon, that along with NOTIFYICONDATA struct should give you a good starting point.

Make sure to remove your icon from the system tray before your application exits, otherwise it will hang around forever.

Just search the forum with 'TrayIcon' keyword. You will get a lot of stuffs.

This thread has a class I wrote attached you can use to make it simple.

Quote:

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How does one begin to program system tray applications?

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Could you please define "system tray application." If this is what I understand, this is an application like any other one, with just a system tray icon added and handled properly. So a good starting point is to develop your application without system tray icon, and add the icon support later. :)

Thank you ejmw, hypheni, Skizmo and Igor for replying and sorry for the late reply!

Igor, that's a very appropriate sketch of what i've done. I just need to incorporate the system tray icon.

Update: The icon appears in the tray (i'm using IDI_QUESTION because i haven't designed an .ico yet) but quickly disappears as soon as i roll the mouse over it.

I still need more info unfortunately so i'd be extremely grateful for any leads.
Thanks.

I just got the icon to stay. However, I'm still clueless about capturing messages like WM_RBUTTONDOWN and displaying a menu for it.

Search the forum for "system tray" and "tray icon", and you're gonna find lots of code snippets. But Shell_NotifyIcon should be carefully read first anyway.

Thanks Igor, I tried searching with "system tray WM_" and i found out that if I

1.) #define WM_NOTIFYICON WM_USER+1
2.) nid.uCallbackMessage = WM_NOTIFYICON
3.) ON_MESSAGE(WM_NOTIFYICON, OnTrayNot)

the messages start getting captured.

Have a look at the attached files. I wrote this class a few months back.

And the Mouse button capturing code is in the .h file, commented part.

Search with

Shellnotifyiconex,c++ function