Edit

Share via

Displaying Custom UI Pages within the Network Connection Wizard

  • Article

 

A custom user interface (UI) supported by the Native 802.11 IHV UI Extensions DLL can be displayed within the operating system's Network Connection Wizard when the request for UI is made through either:

The operating system displays the custom UI within the Network Connection Wizard if the wireless LAN (WLAN) adapter is attempting to connect to a wireless network. In this situation, the request for the custom UI will be displayed as a balloon notification within the period:

  • After the operating system calls the Native 802.11 IHV Extensions DLL's Dot11ExtIhvPerformPreAssociate IHV Handler function to initiate a pre-association operation with the wireless network.

  • Before the Native 802.11 IHV Extensions DLL calls Dot11ExtPostAssociateCompletion to successfully complete the post-association operation.

When inserting the custom UI request within the Network Connection Wizard, the operating system does the following:

  1. Calls the Native 802.11 IHV Extensions DLL's Dot11ExtIhvIsUIRequestPending IHV Handler function to determine whether a UI request is still pending. The operating system specifies the UI request using the globally unique identifier (GUID) that is passed to Dot11ExtSendUIRequest by the Native 802.11 IHV Extensions DLL.

  2. If Dot11ExtIhvIsUIRequestPending returns TRUE for the specified UI request, the operating system will instantiate the requested IWizardExtension COM interface and bind it into the current UI flow of the Network Connection Wizard. When it calls Dot11ExtSendUIRequest, the Native 802.11 IHV Extensions DLL specifies the class identifier (CLSID) of the IWizardExtension implementation within the Native 802.11 IHV UI Extensions DLL.

    The operating system also calls the IWizardExtension::AddPages method, through which the Native 802.11 IHV UI Extensions DLL returns an array of handles for PROPSHEETPAGE structures representing the custom UI pages.

    For more information about the IWizardExtension COM interface, see IWizardExtension COM Interface.

  3. Navigates through the UI pages as controlled by the Native 802.11 IHV UI Extensions DLL through the IWizardSite COM interface. For more information about this interface, see IWizardSite COM Interface.

While the custom UI is displayed, the Native 802.11 IHV UI Extensions DLL can read or write context-specific data through the IPropertyBag COM interface. For more information about this process, see Accessing Profile and Context Data.

After the custom UI is displayed, the Native 802.11 IHV UI Extensions DLL can return the user-entered response data to the Native 802.11 IHV Extensions DLL by calling WlanSendUIResponse. The DLL passes in the GUID for the UI request as well as a pointer to a buffer containing the response data.

After the Native 802.11 IHV UI Extensions DLL calls WlanSendUIResponse, the operating system calls the Native 802.11 IHV Extension DLL's Dot11ExtIhvProcessUIResponse IHV Handler function to forward the response data for the custom UI.

For more information about the WlanSendUIResponse API, refer to the documentation in the Microsoft Windows SDK.