It is very simple you drawing in the Onpaint message handler evry thing. with Texout and so on. There is the CDC class which will help you. Try this @ home. (B&B)

My question is: Do you really need it to be a multi-line edit? Perhaps a simple listbox where you set tab stops would do it, or even a list control? After all, if you want to display columnar data it seems a list control indeed is what you are looking for.

Thanks for your reply. Your suggestion game me an idea to try. Instead of cloning the handler and the message table I can see (from a debuggger trace) that within the button handler of the property page I can use GetParentOwner() to get the CWnd* of the parent dialog. Using this I can send a message right to the base dialog. I do have yet to work out just what message to send. I would like there to be a single handler in the base dialog for all of the various buttons on the proprety pages. Due to this I inclined to look into the WM_NOTIFY scheme or to otherwise use the ON_REGISTERED_MESSAGE() macro mechanism inthe message map and make a custom message type via a registration with windows. Mike

Thanks Jon. Your idea gave me the encouragement to do what needed to be done. I subclassed the CEdit control with a class that has message handlers for all of the appropriate messages that potentially change the caret position in the edit box. These include WM_KEYDOWN, WM_KEYUP, the three left moouse button messages, the three right mouse button messages and the reflected CHANGE message. It turns out that WM_CHAR is not so very useful as this does not get sent except for typed characters that will be modifying the edit box text contents. One sees no response there except for the likes of the arrow keys that actually move the caret around. Thanks again. Mike

Thankyou All that replied on the Timer issue. And thx esp to Nemanja for the link to the timers article. Mike ;)

Yes, I remember Borland's RW and OWL! /ravi "There is always one more bug..." http://www.ravib.com ravib@ravib.com

In case it is of any help, I suggest you follow the following policy when implement OnUpdate: Have a boolean flag, say m_bInOnUpdate to prevent reentrancy, and do not call SetWindowText till you've parsed the whole string. Sort of like this: BOOL CStringEdit::OnUpdate() { if(m_bInOnUpDate)return TRUE; m_bInOnUpDate=TRUE; CString str; GetWindowText(str); // reject invalid characters from str SetWindowText(str); m_bInOnUpDate=FALSE; } (Actually, either of these two techniques would suffice alone.) As a quality of implementation issue, you can also treat the selection (the highlithed portion) of the edit box and make it consistent with your "purged" string. Use GetSel/SetSel for this. Joaquín M López Muñoz Telefónica, Investigación y Desarrollo