Get Ready to Unleash the Power of UCanCode .NET

Basically, when a menu is about to pop up, a WM_INITMENUPOP message is sent to the parent window. In the base class of the CMainFrame, there is already a handler for the WM_INITMENUPOPUP, and it sends the UPDATE_COMMAND_UI sequence to the mainframe, the view, and the App classes, but not to the dialog.

So, you have two options:
1. Have your view class for all the menu enabling for the dialog. I'm not crazy about this approach.
2. Have your view class pass of it's processing to the current dialog, if one exists. I like this.

So, in order to accomplish #2, let's first take a look at how your doing your dialog now:

void CWhateverView::OnButton1()
{
CSomeDlg X;
X.DoModal();
}

In order to accomplish #2 above, we need to have the OnCmdMsg() function (added via classwizard) for your view call the OnCmdMsg for your dialog. However, the OnCmdMsg function can't see the X object in OnButton1, because it's a local variable.

So, you would do the following:
Create a member variable in your view, called pDialog, thats a CDialog *:
CDialog* pDialog;

In your view constructor, set the pointer to 0.
pDialog = 0;

Change your OnButton1, so that it initializes the dialog pointer:
void CWhateverView::OnButton1()
{
pDialog = new CSomeDlg;
pDialog->DoModal();
delete pDialog;
pDialog = 0;
}

Finally, change your view so that it's OnCmdMsg look like the following (you may need to add OnCmdMsg):
BOOL CWhateverView::OnCmdMsg(UINT nID, int nCode, void* pExtra, AFX_CMDHANDLERINFO* pHandlerInfo)
{
if( pDialog && pDialog->OnCmdMsg( nID, nCode, pExtra, pHandlerInfo ) )
return( TRUE );

return CFormView::OnCmdMsg(nID, nCode, pExtra, pHandlerInfo);
}

In addition to the above, in your dialog class you need to *manually* add the ON_UPDATE_COMMAND_UI and ON_COMMAND macros for the routines that will be responsible for enabling/disabling a menu item, and specifying the function to call when the menu item is invoked.