Methods of Creating a Toolbar

MFC provides two classes to create toolbars: CToolBar and CToolBarCtrl (which wraps the Windows common control API). CToolBar provides all of the functionality of the toolbar common control, and it handles many of the required common control settings and structures for you; however, your resulting executable usually will be larger than that created by using CToolBarCtrl.

CToolBarCtrl usually results in a smaller executable, and you may prefer to use CToolBarCtrl if you do not intend to integrate the toolbar into the MFC architecture. If you plan to use CToolBarCtrl and integrate the toolbar into the MFC architecture, you must take additional care to communicate toolbar control manipulations to MFC. This communication is not difficult; however, it is additional work that is unneeded when you use CToolBar.

Visual C++ provides two ways to take advantage of the toolbar common control.

• Create the toolbar using CToolBar, and then call CToolBar::GetToolBarCtrl to get access to the CToolBarCtrl member functions.

• Create the toolbar using CToolBarCtrl's constructor.

Either method will give you access to the member functions of the toolbar control. When you call CToolBar::GetToolBarCtrl, it returns a reference to a CToolBarCtrl object so you can use either set of member functions. See CToolBar for information on constructing and creating a toolbar using CToolBar.

See also

Using CToolBarCtrl
Controls