How to find an owned window in a Win32 application?

Asked Nov 10 '16 at 10:33

Active Nov 10 '16 at 11:41

Viewed 777 times

First, let me explain my situation: In my Win32 app, I have a overlapped window whose HWND name is hwnd1. Now I create another overlapped window with the following code:

HWND hwnd2 = ::CreateWindowEx(0, L"classname", L"window_name",
                WS_OVERLAPPEDWINDOW, left, top, width, height,
                hwnd1, NULL, ::GetModuleHandle(NULL), NULL);

At first, I thought hwnd1 is hwnd2's parent window. But when I use "FindWindowEx" trying to find hwnd2 like below:

::FindWindowEx(hwnd1, nullptr, L"classname", L"window_name");

I can't find it. Then I discovered that hwnd1 is not hwnd2's parent but its owner. So "FindWindowEx" is invalid in this situation. How can I find hwnd2 when I know its owner and class name and window name?

edited Nov 10 '16 at 11:41

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asked Nov 10 '16 at 10:33

Cao Wei

Treat it like a top level window? – Cheers and hth. - Alf Nov 10 '16 at 10:34
You've already answered the question. You know the window has no parent, you know how to find such a window. – David Heffernan Nov 10 '16 at 10:44
1

One possible way would be to use EnumWindows and for each enumed HWND call GetWindow with GW_OWNER to compare with hwnd1. – VuVirt Nov 10 '16 at 10:53
1

Be sure to read up on the differences between parent/child and owner/owned relationships. It's one of Raymond Chen's Five Things Every Win32 Developer Should Know. – andlabs Nov 10 '16 at 12:56
Thanks to all of you.Maybe the easiest way is to traverse the windows hierarchy. But it's inappropriate to do that too frequently. – Cao Wei Nov 24 '16 at 11:35
@andlabs Thank you very much for introducing the lecture of Raymond Chen's. – Cao Wei Nov 24 '16 at 11:38

How to find an owned window in a Win32 application?

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