Items

The dialog template items are specified as elements of an array that also defines the hierarchy of the control windows of the dialog box. Each element of the array is a control window descriptor and defines some control or a child of some control, so that every control within the dialog box is described by this array. The first descriptor is the specification of the dialog box itself.

The dialog template items consist of:

Reserved (USHORT) (BOOL16)

Must be 0.
Children (USHORT)
The number of dialog item child windows that are owned by this dialog item.

This is the number of elements following in the array that are created as child windows of this window. Each window can have any number of child windows, which allows for a tree-structured arrangement.

For example, in the figure in Dialog Template Format and Contents, assuming that there are no more dialog items than are shown, the first item, the dialog box control window descriptor, has three children. The second item has no children, the third item has two children, and the remaining three items have no children.

Class name length (USHORT)
The length of the window class name string.
Class name offset (USHORT)
The offset of the window class name string.
Text length (USHORT)
The length of the text string.

For controls that allow input of text, this is the current text length, not the maximum text length, and so this value changes when text is put into the control.

Text offset (USHORT)
The offset of the text string.
Style (ULONG) (BOOL32)
The window style of the control.

The standard style bits are 16 bits. The use of the remaining 16 bits depends on the class of the control.

x (SHORT)

y (SHORT)

The position of the origin of the dialog item. This is specified in dialog coordinates, with x and y relative to the origin of the parent window.
cx (SHORT)

cy (SHORT)

The size of the dialog item in dialog coordinates; it must be greater than 0.
Identifier (USHORT)
An application-defined identifier for the dialog item.
Reserved (USHORT)
Must be zero.
Control data offset (USHORT)
The offset of the control-specific data for this dialog item. A value of 0 indicates that there is no control data for this dialog item.

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