Is there an event or other technique to detect when a user is “hovering” on a row in a PopupMenu (before the .Change() event is fired)? What I’d like to do is show an item-sensitive Help Tag while the user is hovering. I don’t see an obvious way to do this. This is a Desktop app (Mac OS X and Windows targets)
What kind of app are we talking about ?
Desktop ? Web ? iOS ?
(updated)
ah you mean over each element of the popup as a person hovers through them once the popup is open ?
Yes, basically. Similar to the way HelpTags are displayed on other controls: after a brief pause on the item (row), I want to show a little blurb of text relevant to that row, for individual items of a PopupMenu (or MenuItem that is. Popup()'ed, if that makes it any easier to work with). For Desktop apps, it seems like there’s no event corresponding to that (closest option I can see is MouseMove but that only provides X/Y position, not row index).
i’m not even sure that at a very low level you’d have an easy time of this as on macOS the underlying PopUpButton doest have any tracking for this built in that I can see
You’d almost need a “OverRow” event of some kind with the row index so you could craft the right help tag
Not sure about Windows, but it can be done in macOS pretty simply…
Create a new class and set the super to PopupMenu. Then add a new method:
[code]Public Sub addrow(Text As String, ToolTip as String)
super.AddRow(Text)
#if TargetMacOS
declare function menu lib “AppKit” selector “menu” (obj as ptr) as ptr
declare function itemAtIndex lib “AppKit” selector “itemAtIndex:” (obj as ptr, index as integer) as ptr
declare sub setToolTip lib “AppKit” selector “setToolTip:” (obj as ptr,tip as CFStringRef)
setToolTip(itemAtIndex(menu(ptr(me.Handle)),me.ListCount-1),tooltip)
#Endif
End Sub
[/code]
Oh, cool! That’s great, I’ll give it a try! I have a back-up plan for Windows (and fewer users there anyway) so this might do the trick for now. Thanks!!
ah clever to set it when adding rows instead of trying to track it and do this at mouse move time
that will mean every menu that wants a tip has to be created at runtime and not statically set up in the IDE but not sure thats a huge hit
The menu is already being built at runtime. I haven’t noticed (nor received reports) of a lag, so what’s a few more milliseconds 
none if this works
so far I’m not seeing any tooltips here on 10.12 or 10.14
Following up on this: I got @jim mckay’s method working, although in a slightly modified form, as I ended up switching from PopupMenu to MenuItem (with .popup()) for other reasons. So I just made a new subclass of MenuItem with an override of MenuItem.Constructor(Text As String, Tag As Variant = Nil), as:
[code]Public Sub Constructor(Text as String, tag as Variant = Nil, hovertext as string = “”)
// Constructor(Text As String, Tag As Variant = Nil) – From MenuItem
Super.Constructor(Text, tag)
#if TargetMacOS
declare sub setToolTip lib “AppKit” selector “setToolTip:” (obj as ptr, tip as CFStringRef)
setToolTip(ptr(self.Handle(HandleType.CocoaNSMenuItem)), hovertext)
#Endif
End Sub
[/code]
Works like a charm. I see the tool tip when I hover on the Menu Item, just like I wanted. Thanks a bunch for this idea, Jim!