Animating Child View Transitions

On my last post I promised to start writing the OLE DB client code to replace the ATL Consumer Templates on mobile and embedded devices. Whenever I write a library, I always look for an interesting application to use the library. In this case there is an obvious candidate: a replacement for the SQL Compact "Query Analyzer".

Instead of writing a dull imitation of the existing tabbed interface, I looked for ways to make a WTL SDI application dynamically change the frame's child view and there was no shortage of ideas, especially on CodeProject: Switch Views in a WTL SDI Application. The code works very well, but there is no provision for animating the child view transition. So I decided to do a little research into this issue and produced an early prototype.

The sample application flips between two views (Form and List) by horizontally scrolling the changing views. The idea is that the form view is on the left and the list view is on the right so when you switch views they animate intuitively: the form hides and the list shows by scrolling to the left and the reverse happens by scrolling to the right. This concept can be extended to vertical scrolling so the user can associate the process of navigating through the application with a map.

There were some challenges I had to overcome to implement this. To make animations smoother, I thought about rendering both views (the old that is going out and the new that is coming in) in a big bitmap and then just paint the bitmap in the frame's client area. Interestingly, there is no documented way to render a hidden window to a memory DC so there was no way to render the new view in the bitmap. You can overcome this if you have full control of the new window's paint cycle, but if you use Windows controls like the list view you are out of luck. I even tried forcing a WM_PAINT message with the memory HDC on the WPARAM, but the list would not render the header... So now I only render to a bitmap the old view and scroll in the new view using MoveWindow.

Another issue I had to take care of is the scrolling speed. The speed of ScrollDC increases as the area to scroll diminishes, so you get a scrolling procedure that gets faster and faster. To make it work at the same apparent speed, I had to time the first scroll and then use the system timer to compensate for faster execution times when the scrolled bitmap gets smaller.

I still need to implement the vertical scrolling and to encapsulate all of the code in a mixin class for the WTL main frame. Stay tuned.