R – How Do You “Lock” the focus of a form to a specific control

focusnetwinforms

How does one lock the focus of a .net application to a specific control? For example, if I have a form with 5 text boxes, and I want them filled out in a specific order, how can I stop someone who is in box 1 from tabbing/clicking to box 2, or hitting OK or Cancel or anything else? Is there an easy way, or do I have to manually disable/enable each other control at the appropriate time?

The trouble with the obvious solution (Reset Focus when Focus is Lost) is that MSDN says you can lock up your machine that way:

(Source:http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.forms.control.leave.aspx)

Caution:

Do not attempt to set focus from within the Enter, GotFocus, Leave, LostFocus, Validating, or Validated event handlers. Doing so can cause your application or the operating system to stop responding. For more information, see the WM_KILLFOCUS topic in the "Keyboard Input Reference" section, and the "Message Deadlocks" section of the "About Messages and Message Queues" topic in the MSDN library at http://msdn.microsoft.com/library.

Best Answer

Handle the Leave event of your textBox1. Inside the event handler, if your conditions are not met, for e.g. if the user has not entered some input, reset the focus back to the control.

private void textBox1_Leave(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    if string.isNullOrEmpty(textBox1.Text)
    {
        textBox1.focus();
    }
}

Do this for each of your controls or do it more generic like:

private void textBox_Leave(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    TextBox textBox = sender as TextBox;
    if (string.isNullOrEmpty(textBox.Text)
    {
        textBox.focus();
    }
}

Related Solutions

C# – How to update the GUI from another thread

The simplest way is an anonymous method passed into Label.Invoke:

// Running on the worker thread
string newText = "abc";
form.Label.Invoke((MethodInvoker)delegate {
    // Running on the UI thread
    form.Label.Text = newText;
});
// Back on the worker thread

Notice that Invoke blocks execution until it completes--this is synchronous code. The question doesn't ask about asynchronous code, but there is lots of content on Stack Overflow about writing asynchronous code when you want to learn about it.

Android – How to stop EditText from gaining focus at Activity startup in Android

Excellent answers from Luc and Mark. However, a good code sample is missing. Adding the tags android:focusableInTouchMode="true" and android:focusable="true" to the parent layout (e.g. LinearLayout or ConstraintLayout) like in the following example, will fix the problem.

<!-- Dummy item to prevent AutoCompleteTextView from receiving focus -->
<LinearLayout
    android:focusable="true" 
    android:focusableInTouchMode="true"
    android:layout_width="0px" 
    android:layout_height="0px"/>

<!-- :nextFocusUp and :nextFocusLeft have been set to the id of this component
to prevent the dummy from receiving focus again -->
<AutoCompleteTextView android:id="@+id/autotext"
    android:layout_width="fill_parent" 
    android:layout_height="wrap_content"
    android:nextFocusUp="@id/autotext" 
    android:nextFocusLeft="@id/autotext"/>

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