A custom-draw control is a good choice as long as we don't try to change too much its behavior and appearance.
Otherwise, making a custom or ActiveX control from scratch may be a better option.
Printable View
A custom-draw control is a good choice as long as we don't try to change too much its behavior and appearance.
Otherwise, making a custom or ActiveX control from scratch may be a better option.
Yes, custom draw can be an option and yes, you can make "minor" tweaks to behaviour, taking your tweaks too far may end up being a lot more work than actually designing a new control entirely.
Been there, done that, spent days trying to get a tree control to "appear" to have multiple columns. (it looked so simple.... just a bit of pushing here... and a bit of shoving there .... a few sprinkles of magic dust ...)...
Once released, spent many more weeks debugging and trying to figure out why it didn't work on customer PC's.
Ended up buying a tree-with-columns custom control. Users hated it... End result was rethinking the problem, turning it upside down and inside out and using a listcontrol. It works, 99.99% of the users like it, there's the occasional "smart boy" that suggests "hey, wouldn't this be a lot better with a tree with columns"... >.<