Handling keystrokes

[jesarg]

I have a WinForms application whose main form contains a custom user control (and that custom user control, in turn, contains other custom user controls, etc). If I want the main form to handle keystrokes (such as Ctrl-S or Ctrl-X) without allowing the inner user controls to handle them first, is there any easy way I can guarantee that the main form will pick up the keystroke first (100% of the time)?

[Luc Pattyn]

Hi, you will need the Form.KeyPreview property, the Form.KeyDown event, and the KeyEventArgs.Handled and KeyEventArgs.SuppressKeyPress properties. :)

Luc Pattyn [Forum Guidelines] [My Articles]

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[jesarg]

Thanks a lot. The topic of the intricacies of handling keystrokes is probably worth an article in itself. In my test application, I made a form with a listbox in it. The listbox contained several items, including an item that started with "S", and the application handled the Control-S functionality by displaying a messagebox. Although the Control-S messagebox still showed up when Control-S was pressed while the listbox had focus, the application also highlighted the listbox item that started with "S" (default functionality for a listbox is to highlight based on keypresses regardless of which modifiers are also pressed). The only way to suppress this functionality was to set the KeyEventArgs.SuppressKeyPress property of the Listbox.KeyDown event (it couldn't be done in the Form.KeyDown event). Thus, I can guarantee that my main form handles keypresses like I want it to, but I still have to hunt down the sub-controls one-by-one to make sure they don't handle keypresses when I don't want them to.