MDI in MFC, Conceptually

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From: Roger Lakner (mmm444_at_adelphia.net)
Date: 02/06/05 

Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2005 16:38:46 -0800

This is what I understand the way MDI works in the MFC framework: the
wizard builds you a View class, Main and Child frame classes, the App
class, and a Document class. These classes represent types. And I can
have multiple instances of each type. For example, multiple documents
open simultaneously or multiple views of a document's data open
simultaneously. If I want to have my App work with multiple document
types or multiple View types, I realize I need to create a new
Document class or a new View class to manage these other types. Most
of the MDI sample applications in the documentation and in Prosise's
book show how to implement different View types for a single Document
type. And there are a couple of examples implementing multiple
Document types. And, once explained, these are relatively
straightforward to understand. Here is my question: how would I
implement the following scenario? My application would use one
document type, for example, a BMP image file. And the app requires
only one View type appropriate for displaying a BMP file. But it must
be able to open many such files and display them all at the same time,
each in its own window. This, it seems to me, is fundamentally
different from the sample apps I've seen because the document's data
changes over the course of the App's run (each time I load a new file)
and the view of each (old) set of data must remain constant while that
data changes and a new view of that new data is displayed. In fact, I
think this scenario is conceptually contrary to MDI as its implemented
in the MFC.

Am I missing something? or is this just very hard to implement in MFC?

Thanks in advance for any and all sagely advice and kind
consideration.

Roger

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