A few basics for a newby

Richard Brennan

Hi

I have a form with text boxes and a button.
I have set the tabindex - but the textbox with tabindex set to 1 is not the first thing active when i press tab.
Newbies hay - hope thats not so abvious to fix. lol

There is no default focus - so I have to manual select the terxt box and i want ot be automatically be selected after pressing a radio buton. How do i set the focus for this and can pressing enter move the focu to the next text box? How can i make pressing enter in the last textbox run the click event of a button (what do u sed as the arguments, sender and e?

Hope that makes sence.

Regards.

7 Replies

Know the answer? Post it — somebody with the same question will find it here.

Vulpes15y ago
Accepted answer
If you want to set the focus to the first 'focusable' control (say textBox1) on the first tabpage of the tabcontrol when the form is first displayed, then put this line in your Form_Load eventhandler:

this.ActiveControl = textBox1;

Off the top of my head, I think that should work whether the tabcontrol is first in the tab order or not.

To change the selected tab, just change the tabControl's SelectedIndex property:

tabControl1.SelectedIndex = 1; // to set to second tabpage say
0
Richard Brennan15y ago
cheers again - now the next one lol. I have a tab control - how can i set the focus on the first tab when the form opens for the first time. And how can i set the focus when the current selected tab is changed.
0
Vulpes15y ago
Just assign your button to the property. For example:

this.AcceptButton = button1;
0
Richard Brennan15y ago
i am ok with anchoring. I looked at this.acceptbutton but i did not know how to change the btn that return activated in code. Please give eg.
0
Vulpes15y ago
Yes, you can change the AcceptButton property in code at runtime.

If you want the size of the controls to change in proportion to the change in the form's size, then you'll need to set their Anchor properties - see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.forms.control.anchor.aspx
0
Richard Brennan15y ago
thanx dude.

can i change the form accept button property in code. The form can be made bigger and more txtboxes appear - if t his happens a diffeent button accepting enter would be useful.

While I'm here - what the easiest way to make it things look less - old windows style? If the answer is WPF or XML i will have to leave that w while.
0
Vulpes15y ago
I'd make sure that its TabStop property is set to true otherwise the TextBox won't be included in the tab order.

You can force focus onto a control like this:

textBox1.Focus();

If you set the Form's AcceptButton property to the appropriate Button, then it will be clicked automatically when the user presses ENTER.
0