CEdit selects everything when getting focus

Question

When I move to a CEdit control on my dialog using the tab key or the arrow keys all the text in the control is selected. This behaviour is causing me problems and I would prefer it if the control just put the cursor at the start (or end) of the text and didn't select anything. Is there a simple way to do this (e.g. a property of the control that I can set)?

score 8 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 10 '12 at 22:27

Another way of achieving your goal is to prevent the contents from being selected. When navigating over controls in a dialog the dialog manager queries the respective controls about certain properties pertaining to their behavior. By default an edit control responds with a DLGC_HASSETSEL flag (among others) to indicate to the dialog manager that its contents should be auto-selected.

To work around this you would have to subclass the edit control and handle the WM_GETDLGCODE message to alter the flags appropriately. First, derive a class from CEdit:

class CPersistentSelectionEdit : public CEdit {
public:
    DECLARE_MESSAGE_MAP()
    afx_msg UINT OnGetDlgCode() {
        // Return default value, removing the DLGC_HASSETSEL flag
        return ( CEdit::OnGetDlgCode() & ~DLGC_HASSETSEL );
    }
};

BEGIN_MESSAGE_MAP( CPersistentSelectionEdit, CEdit )
    ON_WM_GETDLGCODE()
END_MESSAGE_MAP()

Next subclass the actual control. There are a number of ways to do this. To keep things simple just declare a class member m_Edit1 of type CPersistentSelectionEdit in your dialog class and add an appropriate entry in DoDataExchange:

// Subclass the edit control
DDX_Control( pDX, IDC_EDIT1, m_Edit1 );

At this point you have an edit control that doesn't have its contents auto-selected when navigated to. You can control the selection whichever way you want.

If you use this method you don't lose the caret position every time you set focus to the text box, so I would prefer it. — DanDan, Aug 14 '14 at 23:22

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 02 '10 at 19:07

2

I don't think that such a style exists.
But you can add OnSetfocus handler with the wizard:

void CMyDlg::OnSetfocusEdit1() 
{
  CEdit* e = (CEdit*)GetDlgItem(IDC_EDIT1);
  e->SetSel(0); // <-- hide selection
}

answered Jan 02 '10 at 19:07

Nick Dandoulakis

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This did not quite work for me. My edit control is multi-line and whose contents can be taller than the control (I have a vertical scroll bar). The bNoScroll needs to be TRUE, and the selection for "no select" is -1, 0, so my code called it like `e->SetSel(-1, 0, TRUE);`. This maintains any current scroll position as I tab through the controls of my dialog, but also ensures nothing is selected once focus returns back to my edit control. – franji1 Jul 05 '17 at 16:25

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered May 10 '20 at 09:55

Please note that there must be a code in your program to highlight the selection. Please find something like this:

CEdit* pEdit = ((CEdit*)GetDlgItem(IDC_EDIT1));
pEdit->SetFocus();
pEdit->SetSel(0, -1); // select everything

Simply comment the last two lines, instead of >SetSel(0). Your code is enabling and disabling which is meaningless to me.

CEdit selects everything when getting focus

3 Answers3