TreeView Remove CheckBox by some Nodes

In the code you’ve shown, you are handling the drawing yourself for all of the nodes whose type is either 5 or 6. For the rest of the types, you’re simply allowing the system to draw the nodes in the default way. That’s why they all have the lines as expected, but the ones you’re owner-drawing do not: You forgot to draw in the lines! You see, when you say e.DrawDefault = false; it’s assumed that you really do mean it. None of the regular drawing is done, including the standard lines.

You’ll either need to draw in those lines yourself, or figure out how to get by without owner-drawing at all.

From the code you have now, it looks like you’re trying to simulate the system’s native drawing style as much as possible in your owner-draw code, so it’s not clear to me what exactly you accomplish by owner-drawing in the first place. If you’re just trying to keep checkboxes from showing up for type 5 and 6 nodes (which, like the lines, are simply not getting drawn because you aren’t drawing them!), there’s a simpler way to do that without involving owner drawing.


So, you ask, what is that simpler way to hide the checkboxes for individual nodes? Well, it turns out that the TreeView control itself actually supports this, but that functionality is not exposed in the .NET Framework. You need to P/Invoke and call the Windows API to get at it. Add the following code to your form class (make sure you’ve added a using declaration for System.Runtime.InteropServices):

private const int TVIF_STATE = 0x8;
private const int TVIS_STATEIMAGEMASK = 0xF000;
private const int TV_FIRST = 0x1100;
private const int TVM_SETITEM = TV_FIRST + 63;

[StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential, Pack = 8, CharSet = CharSet.Auto)]
private struct TVITEM
{
    public int mask;
    public IntPtr hItem;
    public int state;
    public int stateMask;
    [MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.LPTStr)]
    public string lpszText;
    public int cchTextMax;
    public int iImage;
    public int iSelectedImage;
    public int cChildren;
    public IntPtr lParam;
}

[DllImport("user32.dll", CharSet = CharSet.Auto)]
private static extern IntPtr SendMessage(IntPtr hWnd, int Msg, IntPtr wParam,
                                         ref TVITEM lParam);

/// <summary>
/// Hides the checkbox for the specified node on a TreeView control.
/// </summary>
private void HideCheckBox(TreeView tvw, TreeNode node)
{
    TVITEM tvi = new TVITEM();
    tvi.hItem = node.Handle;
    tvi.mask = TVIF_STATE;
    tvi.stateMask = TVIS_STATEIMAGEMASK;
    tvi.state = 0;
    SendMessage(tvw.Handle, TVM_SETITEM, IntPtr.Zero, ref tvi);
}

All of the messy stuff at the top are your P/Invoke declarations. You need a handful of constants, the TVITEM structure that describes the attributes of a treeview item, and the SendMessage function. At the bottom is the function you’ll actually call to do the deed (HideCheckBox). You simply pass in the TreeView control and the particular TreeNode item from which you want to remove the checkmark.

So you can remove the checkmarks from each of the child nodes to get something that looks like this:

   TreeView with checkmarks hidden for child nodes

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