Change System Cursor

[keb1965]

Background:
I have been searching for a way to create a borderless full screen form with several controls and have the form translucent but have the controls opaque. Sice I haven't been able to effectively do this (writing it from scratch would be more work than I want to devote to it) I decided to fake it.
Since it is all about appearance anyway, I figured I could display 2 forms, so what I did is displayed a full screen borderless form with an opaque property of 65%, then I displayed a modal dialog (again borderless) in the center of the 65% form, then set it to TopMost. Cool .. everything looks great, and the controls are what I want ... except the cursor.

When the mouse moves outside of the modal dialog, I want the cursor to change to OCR_NO (cursors.no) except it always changes to the default arrow. I tried changing the 65% form to cursors.no but it still doesn't work, because it is not available (i.e. the dialog is modal).

I even tried using the SetSystemCursor API and it still will not update it.

Maybe I am missing something really silly .. or maybe I need to step back for a while. Regardless, I'd be supremely appreciative if I could get some direction on this problem.

TIA

 

[jmcilhinney]

Don't use a modal dialogue. Use a modeless dialogue, i.e. an owned form. By definition, it will always appear in front of it's owner but it will not prevent access to that owner.

 

[keb1965]

Well, that seems to work, the only problem at this point is if the user clicks outside the second form, the translucent form takes precendence and I have to handle the events in the translucent form to make sure it is behind the actual form we want to work with.

Of course that is a simple proposition, but it causes a brief flicker when the mouse moves outside the form ... maybe I need to intercept the mouseclick event ...

I'll take your advice and try to intercept the messages and make it work as expected.

Thanks