Setting tab order in WPF

Question

How do I set tab ordering in WPF? I have an ItemsControl with some items expanded and some collapsed and would like to skip the collapsed ones when I'm tabbing.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

You can skip elements in the tab sequence by setting KeyboardNavigation.IsTabStop on the element in XAML.

KeyboardNavigation.IsTabStop="False"

You can setup a trigger that would toggle this property based on the expanded state.

Answer 2

If you want to explicitly set the tab ordering for elements in your form, the following attached property is supposed to help:

<Control KeyboardNavigation.TabIndex="0" ... />

I say "supposed to help" as I haven't found it very reliable though I probably need to read more about how it is intended to be used. I only post this half baked answer because no one else mentioned this property.

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Note that in Win RT, the property is just TabIndex="0".

Answer 3

<Control KeyboardNavigation.TabIndex="0" ... /> Works perfectly fine... For example-

<ComboBox Height="23" 
          Margin="148,24,78,0" 
          Name="comboBoxDataSet"
          VerticalAlignment="Top"
          SelectionChanged="comboBoxDestMarketDataSet_SelectionChanged"
          DropDownOpened="comboBoxDestMarketDataSet_DropDownOpened"
          KeyboardNavigation.TabIndex="0" />
<ComboBox Height="23" 
          Margin="148,56,78,0" 
          Name="comboBoxCategory" 
          VerticalAlignment="Top" 
          SelectionChanged="comboBoxDestCategory_SelectionChanged"
          DropDownOpened="comboBoxDestCategory_DropDownOpened"
          KeyboardNavigation.TabIndex="1" />

Will allow you to navigate through these two combo boxes using TAB key.

Answer 4

I think there is a much easier solution here, at the top within your control or window or whatever, you could add:

KeyboardNavigation.TabNavigation="Cycle"

This also automaticaly ignores the collapsed tabs.

Answer 5

Another alternative that has worked for me in the past is to simply remove all explicit TabIndex statements, and let the controls use the order that they're declared in XAML work their magic.

This, of course, may require you to reorder your controls. But this is a simple copy-paste operation.