How To Set Tabindex In C#

Control concepts:

Tab Order

If you have worked with a computer long enough to want to acquire programming, you probably also know that you tin use the Tab central on the keyboard to navigate through a window/dialog. This allows you to go on your hands on the keyboard when filling out a course or something similar, instead of having to use the mouse to select the next field/control.

WPF supports this behavior straight out of the box, and even ameliorate: It will automatically establish the order used when moving from one field to another, so in general, you don't take to worry about this at all. However, sometimes the design of your Window/dialog crusade WPF to use a tab order that yous might non hold with, for various reasons. Also, you may make up one's mind that certain controls should not exist a part of the tabbing order. Permit me to illustrate this with an case:

This dialog consists of a Grid, split in the centre, with StackPanel'due south on each side, containing labels and textboxes. The default tab society behavior is to start with the offset control of the Window and and then tab through each of the kid controls found inside it, before moving to the next command. Since the dialog consists of vertically oriented StackPanels, that would mean that nosotros would kickoff in the Showtime name field and so move to the Street proper name field and then the City field, before moving to StackPanel number two, containing the fields for Last name and Zip lawmaking. When tabbing out of the second StackPanel, the two buttons would finally exist reached.

Nevertheless, for this dialog, that's non the behavior I want. Instead I desire to tab from First name to Final name (then basically moving horizontally instead of vertically), and on top of that, I don't want to enter the City field when tabbing through the grade, because that will be automatically filled based on the Zero code in this imaginary dialog and has therefore been made readonly. To attain all of this, I will use two properties: TabIndex and IsTabStop. TabIndex is used to define the gild, while the IsTabStop property will force WPF to skip a control when tabbing through the Window. Here'southward the markup used to create the dialog:

          <Window x:Class="WpfTutorialSamples.Control_concepts.TabOrderSample"
            xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
            xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
            xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/alloy/2008"
            xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006"
            xmlns:local="clr-namespace:WpfTutorialSamples.Control_concepts"
            mc:Ignorable="d"
            Title="TabOrderSample" Superlative="250" Width="400">
    <Grid Margin="20">
            <Grid.ColumnDefinitions>
            <ColumnDefinition Width="*" />
            <ColumnDefinition Width="xx" />
            <ColumnDefinition Width="*" />
            </Grid.ColumnDefinitions>
            <Grid.RowDefinitions>
            <RowDefinition Height="*" />
            <RowDefinition Peak="Auto" />
            </Grid.RowDefinitions>
            <StackPanel>
            <Label>First proper name:</Label>
            <TextBox TabIndex="0" />
            <Label>Street name:</Characterization>
            <TextBox TabIndex="2" />
            <Label>City:</Label>
            <TextBox TabIndex="v" IsReadOnly="True" IsTabStop="False" Background="Gainsboro" />
            </StackPanel>
            <StackPanel Filigree.Column="2">
            <Characterization>Last proper noun:</Characterization>
            <TextBox TabIndex="i" />
            <Label>Zero Code:</Label>
            <TextBox TabIndex="4" />
            </StackPanel>
            <Push Grid.Row="1" HorizontalAlignment="Right" Width="fourscore">Add together</Push>
            <Button Grid.Row="one" Grid.Column="2" HorizontalAlignment="Left" Width="80">Cancel</Button>
    </Grid>
</Window>

Notice how I simply give each relevant control a number in the TabIndex property, and so utilise the IsTabStop for the TextBox used for the City - it's that simple to command the tab lodge in a dialog!

Summary

Controlling the tab club of a dialog is very important, but fortunately for us, WPF does a very good job of automatically defining a proper tab order for you. Notwithstanding, in some cases, it volition make sense to go in and take control, using the TabIndex and IsTabStop properties, as illustrated in the instance to a higher place.

This article has been fully translated into the post-obit languages:

Catalan
Chinese
Czech
Dutch
French
German
Hebrew
Hungarian
Italian
Japanese
Smoothen
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
Vietnamese

Is your preferred language not on the list? Click here to help us translate this commodity into your language!