My goal is to simply use a pop-up box to ask the user for an input. I've searched around quite a bit and pretty much all the results say that creating a messageBox is really easy:
MessageBox (NULL, "Hello World" , "Hello", MB_OKCANCEL);
But that creating a pop-up that takes input is more involved and there isn't a straight forward way to do it. All of the results I could find on Google were dated somewhere from 2001 to 2005. I guess I'm here asking if some more straight forward solution has come about in recent years.
Hopefully something nice and straight forward like in Java:
int number = JOptionPane.showInputDialog ("Enter an integer");
If that isn't the case, could I get a brief explanation of how to do it?
Edit: I couldn't get anything to work. :( I ended up writing the code to do the work in Java, and then wrote one line of C++ code to call the .jar file. :-/ Since the issue was time sensitive, it was better than nothing.
There is nothing like that for pure C++. Basically what you're trying to do can only be achieved by using an API call to the OS or by using some GUI library like Qt (which I recommend cause it's waaaaay easier then calling native APIs and it's also multi-platform)
Using Qt you can show an input dialog pretty much the same way you do it on java:
You can download the Qt library here: qt.nokia.com/products/developer-tools/
try this: InputBox in c++ vs2010
My answer is based on Stephen Quan's answer to How to load & call a VBScript function from within C++? Added full UTF-8 support, as you can gather from the code comments in the CPP file. Unlike using Microsoft Script Control to create the InputBox, this can be used in x86 and x64 executables, libraries, and controls.
"inputbox.h":
"inputbox.cpp":
Create the two above files and then add them to your Visual Studio project.
In any file you want the input or password box functions, (found in the header), simply include the header:
I also got rid of the default Windows application icon in the title bar of the VBScript InputBox, because a lot of people I've seen complain about how ugly it is to see that there.
Let me know if you have any questions.
I have to admit that I haven't really done much in the way of input boxes in ages, but you basically have to go outside C++ in order to get any kind of graphical input box. There's simply no mechanism built into the language for that kind of stuff for portability reasons. I don't remember if it applied to C++ as well, but C doesn't even assume you have a console. Anyway, your best bet would be something along the lines you were already trying: Win32 API, Qt, etc. If you can use the console, however, feel free to just use the iostream library to get the job done.
If you are using Visual C++ Express there are a number of free resource editors that can be used to create dialogs. ResEdit is one of the better ones I've found.
You need to create a dialog resource in a .RC file that you add to your project.
Then, It is a very simple case of calling DialogBox - which will load the dialog box from your resource file and place it on the screen. The passed in DialogProc will be called with a number of notifications. Typically you would want to return FALSE for everything, but handle WM_INITDIALOG as a place to initialize the edit control with text, and WM_COMMAND will be sent when a button is clicked.
Using a console window is better suited to the mode of communication where a program prompts the user, continues, prompts the user again, and so on.
And for that you can use the standard library's facilities like
cin
andcout
.