Help me understand this C code
c, winapi, windows-ce, windows-mobile
Solution
The block of code that begins with the comment "Get the name of the item" does not make sense to me. If you are getting the listview item why does the code set the parameters of the item being retrieved, because if you already had the values there would be no need to retrieve them.
After that comment, the first line is to specify to TreeView_GetItem (which, by the way, is actually a SendMessage in disguise) that we want to retrieve the text of the item and the associated lParam. The next line specifies the handle to the item about which we want information.
The following line specifies where the retrieved text must be saved, i.e. in the szName buffer, which has been allocated at the beginning of the function; the last line before the function call specifies the size of such buffer, so to avoid buffer overflows.
I suggest you to have a look at the documentation of TreeView_GetItem and of TVITEM to understand better what's going on.
Secondly near the comment "original" is the original line of code which will compile with a varning under embedded visual c++, but if you copy the exact same code into visual studio 2008 it will not compile. Since I did not write any of this code and am trying to learn is it possible the original author made a mistake on this line, since the *pRoot should point to and HKEY type yet he is casting to an HTREEITEM type which should never work since the data types don't match?
It's not clear what the code is trying to do there; at first glance I'd say that in the lParam associated to each item in the root node of the treeview is stored a handle to a registry key, and the procedure retrieves it in that way. Still, if it was like that, the (HTREEITEM) cast wouldn't make sense at all; probably it was a mistake, forgiven by the compiler because it treated all handles as plain void *; if my hypothesis is correct you should keep the original line, just replacing (HTREEITEM) with (HKEY).
Problem
``` INT GetTree (HWND hWnd, HTREEITEM hItem, HKEY *pRoot, TCHAR *pszKey, INT nMax) { TV_ITEM tvi; TCHAR szName[256]; HTREEITEM hParent; HWND hwndTV = GetDlgItem (hWnd, ID_TREEV); memset (&tvi, 0, sizeof (tvi)); hParent = TreeView_GetParent (hwndTV, hItem); if (hParent) { // Get the parent of the parent of the... GetTree (hWnd, hParent, pRoot, pszKey, nMax); // Get the name of the item. tvi.mask = TVIF_TEXT; tvi.hItem = hItem; tvi.pszText = szName; tvi.cchTextMax = dim(szName); TreeView_GetItem (hwndTV, &tvi); //send the TVM_GETITEM message? lstrcat (pszKey, TEXT ("\\")); lstrcat (pszKey, szName); } else { *pszKey = TEXT ('\0'); szName[0] = TEXT ('\0'); // Get the name of the item. tvi.mask = TVIF_TEXT | TVIF_PARAM; tvi.hItem = hItem; tvi.pszText = szName; tvi.cchTextMax = dim(szName); if (TreeView_GetItem (hwndTV, &tvi)) //*pRoot = (HTREEITEM)tvi.lParam; //original hItem = (HTREEITEM)tvi.lParam; else { INT rc = GetLastError(); } } return 0; } ``` The block of code that begins with the comment "Get the name of the item" does not make sense to me. If you are getting the listview item why does the code set the parameters of the item being retrieved? If you already had the values there would be no need to retrieve them. Secondly near the comment "original" is the original line of code which will compile with a warning under embedded visual c++ 4.0, but if you copy the exact same code into visual studio 2008 it will not compile. Since I did not write any of this code, and am trying to learn, is it possible the original author made a mistake on this line? The *pRoot should point to HKEY type yet he is casting to an HTREEITEM type which should never work since the data types don't match?