How To Suppress Default Pop-up Menu When You Use Custom Menu

MORE INFORMATION

When you right-click on the TextBox control, its default pop-up menu is displayed. Visual Basic does not have a property or any other built-in mechanism that directly disables this feature. However, setting the control's Enabled property to False prevents the menu from being displayed, although this allows the user to see that the control is disabled.

One workaround is to use the Windows LockWindowUpdate application programming interface (API) in conjunction with the Enabled property. The LockWindowUpdate function disables or re- enables drawing in a specified window. After the operation is complete, the control is re-enabled, and the LockWindowUpdate API is called a second time to resume drawing of the control.

Steps to Create Sample Project

1. Start a new Standard EXE project in Visual Basic. Form1 is created by default.
2. Add a TextBox control to Form1.
3. Click Menu Editor from the Tools menu, and create a menu named mnuPopUp on Form1. Clear the Visible check box, and add items such as the following:

   Caption: Name
   File: mnuPopup
   New: mnuOne
   Open: MnuTwo

4. Add the following code to the code window of Form1:

         Private Declare Function LockWindowUpdate Lib "user32" _
            (ByVal hwndLock As Long) As Long
   
         Private Sub mnuOne_Click()
            Text1.Text = "Menu One was clicked"
         End Sub
   
         Private Sub mnuTwo_Click()
            Text1.Text = "Menu two was clicked"
         End Sub
   
         Private Sub Text1_MouseDown(Button As Integer, Shift As Integer, _
            X As Single, Y As Single)
   
            If Button = vbRightButton Then
            ' Avoid the 'disabled' gray text by locking updates
               LockWindowUpdate Text1.hWnd
   
               ' A disabled TextBox will not display a context menu
               Text1.Enabled = False
   
               ' Give the previous line time to complete
               DoEvents
   
               ' Display our own context menu
               PopupMenu mnuPopup
   
               ' Enable the control again
               Text1.Enabled = True
   
               ' Unlock updates
               LockWindowUpdate 0&
            End If
         End Sub
   
   					

5. Save and run the project.
6. Right-click on Text1. Only the custom menu is displayed. The standard editing menu is not shown.

Alternatively, you can subclass the control to supress the default pop-up menu. Through subclassing, you can monitor for the appropriate mouse messages and handle them accordingly. See the "References" section to follow for more information on this topic.