Microsoft & .NETVisual C#Visual C++/MFC Tutorial - Lesson 6: SDI and MDI Applications

Visual C++/MFC Tutorial – Lesson 6: SDI and MDI Applications

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Lesson 6: SDI and MDI Applications

We are getting to some advanced stuff now. In this lesson I am not going to go in depth at all. I will just give you a flavor of the structure of a SDI (single document interface) and a MDI (multiple document interface) application. In the last lesson we will build a SDI application and you can see the nitty gritty there.

The SDI application is typically used when you intend to work with only one data set at a time. For instance, the program notepad.exe is a SDI application. Netscape is also an SDI application. At any one time, there is only one document open at a time. Word for Windows and the VC++ developer studio are MDI applications. In these you can have several documents opened at once. This is particularly useful when you want to cut and paste between documents. Another use for MDI applications is to have one document, but several different views open that view the data differently.  A graphing application comes to mind where in one window you have a spreadsheet-like data list, and in another window you have a plot of the data. For small applications, a SDI application will usually be all you need. After you master it, the jump to MDI is a snap. Let’s go over the structure of a SDI app.

Remember that in a dialog app, we had just two main classes.

CWinApp
and

CDialog
. Here again we have a

CWinApp
which serves the same purpose as it did in lesson 5. The

CDialog
class however is replaced by 3 other classes:

CMainFrame
,

CDocument
, and

CView
.

CDocument
is a class that has no display, and typically doesn’t react much with the messaging system of windows. It is used as a class to manage your data. MFC will create the code automatically which handles the event of File->Save, File->SaveAs, File->Close, and File->Open. All you need to do is to fill in the blank functions in the

CDocument
class.

Next is the

CView
. Most likely you will spend more time writing code to display and interact with the document’s data then you will writing any other code. This is where the

CView
comes in. The

CView
is a class derived from

CWnd
, which is used for displaying your

CDocument
in some way. It is also one of the places where you can handle events like mouse clicks and what not. The heart of the

CView
is usually a call to get a pointer to your document followed by some drawing routines to display the data in your document.

The

CMainFrame
acts as a way to bridge the gap between your document/view classes and the rest of the application. Do you see that frame which goes all around applications boarders? That is the Main Frame window of the application. The title bar, the menu, the scroll bars, the status bar, and the tool bars are all part of the main frame window in an SDI application.  You typically put the code to handle these objects in the

CMainFrame
class. The

CMainFrame
class is the main window of the application. The

CView
class is typically a child window of the

CMainFrame
. (For the most part, the child/parent window relations just tell windows what windows are ‘stuck’ to what other windows. If you move a parent window, all of the children will move also. If you destroy a parent window, all of the children will be destroyed. Etc.)

You should have a pretty good idea now of how SDI applications are constructed. MDI applications are similar, but there can be several

CDocument
classes in existence at the same time and there is an added class called

CChildFrame
which acts as a connection between the

CView
and the

CMainFrame
.

History

Date Posted: August 9, 2000

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