How to handle all key presses in a parent window - c

Question

Ive been struggling for a while with a basic UI thing. I have a parent window and several child windows. With child windows such as button (BS_CHECKBOX style) and edit Im not able to process any message for pressing the ESC key event. I could subclass child windows but it seems to be an overkill just to handle one event. I also have a listview child and for some reason I can handle the VK_ESCAPE correctly. I also checked spy++ and noticed there are NO messages sent to the parent window when ESC key is pressed (and the child is focused). If I set spy++ to log child messages only, the correct messages are generated for the key press - they are just not passed to the parent. Any ideas what (not) to do?
Main window loop:
MSG Msg;
while (GetMessage(&Msg, NULL, 0, 0))
{
TranslateMessage (&Msg);
DispatchMessage (&Msg);
}
Working code in parent's WndProc for handling listview key press:
case WM_NOTIFY:
switch (((LPNMHDR)lParam)->code)
{
case LVN_KEYDOWN:
if (((LPNMLVKEYDOWN)lParam)->wVKey == VK_ESCAPE)
Exit();
break;
}
break;
Thanks,
Kra

Answer 1

One way to do this is to catch it in your message loop before it gets dispatched to the focus window, e.g.:
MSG Msg;
while (GetMessage(&Msg, NULL, 0, 0))
{
if (Msg.message == WM_KEYDOWN && Msg.wParam == VK_ESCAPE)
{
// process escape key
}
else
{
TranslateMessage(&Msg);
DispatchMessage(&Msg);
}
}
There are other ways to do it of course, but this is a very simple solution.