October 19th, 2011

Why do some infotips repeat the name of the item as well as the infotip?

A customer noticed that when the user hovered over their application name in the Start menu, the infotip that pops up includes their product name:

♫ 
Contoso Professional Music Studio Deluxe 2010
Record and mix studio-quality music from your computer.

Contoso Professional Music Studio De…

◕  Fabrikam Chart 2.0
ℒ  Litware 2010

… but no other program on the Start menu included the product name in the description:

◕ 
Design and print charts and graphs with ease.

Fabrikam Chart 2.0

♫  Contoso Professional Music Studio De…
ℒ  Litware 2010

The customer compared their shortcut with the other ones but couldn’t find anything that was telling Explorer, “Include the program name in the pop-up infotip, please.” Because the reason for the name being included in the infotip had nothing to do with the properties stored in the shortcut. The reason the name was included in the infotip is that the name was being truncated in the main display. When an infotip is about to be displayed for a listview item, the listview sends a LVN_GET­INFO­TIP notification with a NMLV­GET­INFO­TIP structure. If the LVGIT_UNFOLDED flag is not set, then the infotip is being displayed for a truncated item, and the pszText is pre-filled with the full name. The program should then append its information to the existing text so that the full name is the first line of the infotip. On the other hand, if the LVGIT_UNFOLDED flag is set, then the item text is fully-visible and you should just copy your desired description text into the pszText buffer. The customer was happy to get this information. Their designer wanted only the description to appear in the infotip, and now they know that they need to shorten the program name to make the name disappear from the infotip.

Bonus chatter: Microsoft® WinFX™ Software Development Kit for Microsoft® Pre-Release Windows Operating System Code-Named “Longhorn”, Beta 1 Web Setup.

Author

Raymond has been involved in the evolution of Windows for more than 30 years. In 2003, he began a Web site known as The Old New Thing which has grown in popularity far beyond his wildest imagination, a development which still gives him the heebie-jeebies. The Web site spawned a book, coincidentally also titled The Old New Thing (Addison Wesley 2007). He occasionally appears on the Windows Dev Docs Twitter account to tell stories which convey no useful information.

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