CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#winforms
don
don

Reputation: 203

Preventing tabbing on some controls inside a Form

I have a form that has multiple UserControls in it.

When a button inside a user control is pressed, it will open and add another user control contaning a text box and 2 buttons.

As soon as this user contorl is opened, the focus/cursor goes to the text box.

Pressing TAB button takes focus from one control to another, moving all through the form.

So basically I want to avoid this scenario.

i.e, there is a UserControl object called XXX. Now when I click "Open Edit" button in it, it opens a new UserControl object called YYY inside XXX.

UserControl YYY has a text box and 2 (Save & Cancel) buttons.

I want to make sure that tabbing keeps the focus always inside YYY until YYY is closed by clicking the Cancel button.

I am not sure whether there's a form wide TabStop property? Or should i have to loop through other controls and set it's TabStop to FALSE?

Considering that there're many other UserControls under different classes, it's kinda tedious.

Is there a easier way to achieve this?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1567

Answers (2)

Reza Aghaei
Reza Aghaei

Reputation: 125197

Actually your question is:

How to keep tab stop in a user control?

You can override ProcessTabKey in your user control that you want to keep the tab stop.

protected override bool ProcessTabKey(bool forward)
{
    return this.SelectNextControl(this.ActiveControl, true, true, true, true);
}

This way, the tab stop will remain in your user control.

Upvotes: 6

Sam Axe
Sam Axe

Reputation: 33738

You will need to set the TabStop property of each control to False.

You can do this either:

  1. through the Designer
  2. with code (possibly in the Form_Load event handler) for specific controls
  3. with a recursive function for mostly all controls.

Naïve recursive function:
I write in VB, so you'll need to translate

Public Sub LoopControls()   '  Assumes this function lives within the scope of a Form
    LoopControls(Me)
End Sub  

Public Sub LoopControls(ByVal container As Control)
    '
    '  TODO:  Do something with the current control (container)
    '

    '
    '  Loop over the current control's inner controls
    '
    If Not Nothing Is container.Controls
        For Each control As Control In container.Controls
            LoopControls(control)
        Next
    End If
End Sub

Upvotes: 2

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